Disordered Minds

by Minette Walters

  "Soon as her mum phoned to see if she was round our place, I went and checked. We used to go through the gate in the fence at the back and in the kitchen door. I watched her through the window, stuffing her face with ice cream."

  "Did you talk to her?"

  "No chance. She'd have gone for me. It was my fault that cow Brett suspended her."

  "What about Grace?"

  "Didn't see her."

  "Howard?"

  She shook her head.

  "What time was it?"

  Louise shrugged. "Nine o'clock or thereabouts."

  "Morning? Evening?"

  "Morning. I was down at the nick two hours later, being quizzed by the cops."

  It sounded convincing, but Andrew wasn't much of a judge in these matters. Women had always run rings around him. He couldn't forget that, at the period Louise was describing, she was only thirteen years old-and, if her ex-headmistress was to be believed, not very bright. "Had you had dealings with the police before?" he asked. "I can't imagine withholding information at thirteen."

  Her eyes glittered scornfully, but whether in contempt for Andrew's boyhood fear or impatience with his questioning, he couldn't tell. "It was my mother did most of the talking, and she was mad as hell that anyone'd think we knew where Cill was and wouldn't tell."

  "But you knew."

  "Right." She lit another cigarette. "That's why I talked about the rape." She forestalled his next attempt at a question. "Oh, come on, lighten up, for Christ's sake! What was the big deal? I wasn't going to rat on Cill, even if I did think she was a little bitch. All she'd done was take herself off for the night ... hundreds of kids do it every day. In any case, I didn't want the cops finding out we'd been truanting round there because I didn't know what they'd do to Grace. Or me for that matter," she added reflectively. "My plan was to go round as soon as I got home and give Cill a bollocking, but Mum got fired up about the rape and wouldn't let me out of her sight. After that it all went pear-shaped."

  "How?"

  "How do you think?" she said morosely. "When I next went round, it looked as if a bloody war had broken out."

  *20*

  It was like watching a battery-operated toy run down. Whatever had stimulated Louise to come to Andrew's house and tell her story was rapidly being neutralized by the wine and exhaustion. She rested her head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling.

  "Did you go inside the house?"

  "I was too damn scared."

  "Why?"

  "Everything was on the floor."

  "Where?"

  "In the kitchen ... in the sitting room..."

  "What sort of things?"

  "Everything. Drawers, broken bottles, plants. It looked like a bomb had hit it."

  Andrew flicked her a sideways glance. "How could you see into the sitting room? I thought the curtains were pulled."

  "Not at the back they weren't. There were some French windows onto the garden. I looked through them." She flicked ash onto his carpet before taking another drag on her cigarette. "It did my head in as a matter of fact. I knew something bad had happened. There was blood on the pane ... right in front of my eyes. I thought it was Cill's."

  "Why?"

  She turned her head toward him. "Because Grace was a loony," she said flatly, "and I always knew she'd turn nasty one day. Cill used to tease her something chronic about the way she spoke and I reckoned she'd gone too far and made Grace flip."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Ran home, kept my mouth shut and refused to go out for weeks." She gave a faint smile at his expression. "I thought the cops'd come down on me like a ton of bricks for not telling them where she was on the Saturday. I should have done ... would have done if my stupid mother hadn't stuck her oar in first."

  "Which day was this?"

  She thought for a moment. "It had to be the Tuesday. I ducked in on my way back from school because I was hacked off with everyone asking questions about Cill. Come the Wednesday I had a fit, and the folks kept me back till we moved to Boscombe."

  Andrew filed that piece of information away. "Why didn't you tell your mother what you'd seen?"

  Louise didn't answer immediately but returned to staring at the ceiling as if wisdom could be found in its matte white paint. "What makes you think I didn't?" she asked then.

  "There's no record of her going to the police."

  "That doesn't mean I didn't tell her." She bent forward abruptly to kill the cigarette. "She went off like a rocket, so did my dad. How could I let the family down? What were the neighbors going to say? Didn't I understand what a dreadful position I'd put them in? First a rape ... then keeping quiet about where Cill was ... now telling stories about blood on Grace's windows..." She gave a hollow laugh. "They never liked me much so I'm sure they thought I was involved in some way."

  Andrew placed his glass on the floor to avoid looking at her. "Were you?"

  "Course not," she said without heat. "I hadn't a clue what was going on. Even when they arrested Howard, it didn't make any better sense. I kept asking Mum what had happened to Cill, till she boxed my ears and told me never to mention her again. It was a weird time ... I couldn't make head or tail of anything. In the end I worked out that Howard'd killed Cill, too, as being the only thing that made sense ... but it was way too late to say anything. The cops would've crucified the folks for keeping quiet."

  She was very believable, thought Andrew. Everything dovetailed neatly until he thought about the questions she hadn't answered. "He couldn't have done," he said evenly. "He didn't have a car and there was only one body in the house. So how did he get rid of her?"

  "Who knows?" she said glibly. "Promised to take her home? Took her for a walk? He was a right little pedophile ... if he'd got away with Grace's murder, he'd've been picking kiddies off the street. It suits you to think he was innocent, but it doesn't mean he was. I was there, I knew him." She flashed him another contemptuous look. "He was a slimeball."

  Andrew propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his hands under his chin. "Except there was no evidence anyone else had been in Grace's house," he told her. "Why weren't Cill's fingerprints all over the place? Why weren't yours? Even if the police couldn't identify them, they'd have questioned why two unknown sets were in there. Grace was a known recluse. The first thing everyone said about her was that she didn't have visitors."

  "Not my problem," she said again. "You explain it. I can only tell you what I know. She was always cleaning up after us."

  It was a clever tack-a challenge of belief-and he wondered fleetingly why her headmistress had thought her stupid. "Howard couldn't have killed anyone on the Monday or Tuesday, Louise. His movements were accounted for all day ... which is why the prosecution pathologist argued strongly that the murder took place on the Wednesday." He lifted a cynical eyebrow. "But that's not your problem either, I suppose?"

  She flashed him a mischievous smile. "Right."

  "So why pick on Howard? Nothing you've said so far proves he was even there."

  "Who else could it have been?" she said with a shrug. "There was no one else went near Grace, except us and him."

  "How about Roy Trent, Colley Hurst and Micky Hopkinson?"

  She was ready for that, he thought. Her answer was too quick. "Dream on," she said scornfully. "They never left Colliton Way. What the hell would they be doing at Grace's?"

  "Looking for Cill," Andrew suggested. "They'd raped her once, maybe they fancied another go." He watched her mouth turn down. "Perhaps they were looking for you?"

  "What for?"

  "To teach you a lesson for giving their description to the police." For the first time lines of indecision appeared around her eyes. "I should think they were mad as hell to have a two-bit kid rat on them."

  "I didn't name them."

  "You didn't need to. They must have been so well known to the police that saying there were three of them was probably enough." He watched her for a moment. "If you added in th
e bonus of Colley Hurst's red hair, then you might just as well have named them."

  "It wasn't them," she said dismissively, "and I should bloody well know. I married one of the bastards."

  Andrew smiled. "That's hardly proof of innocence."

  "You think I'd marry a murderer?"

  "No reason not to. They don't have 'M' tattooed on their foreheads."

  She considered for a moment. "Meaning he might have done it, but I didn't know."

  "That's one interpretation."

  "What's the other?"

  "That you could marry him safely because no one else knew he was a murderer." He watched a look of amusement crinkle her eyes. "So why did you marry him?"

  "Why does anyone marry anyone? He was like Everest ... he was there."

  "Didn't it worry you what he did to Cill?"

  "Not particularly. He was a damn sight better prospect than the bastard I had before. At least Roy had a place to live with some money coming in." She shrugged. "Name me a man who hasn't gone in for a bit of rough sex at some point in his life. It's natural, isn't it? You're all just Stone-Age types under the suits."

  Andrew gave an abrupt laugh. "So that's where I've been going wrong. I had no idea sex was supposed to be painful. I thought it was about pleasuring women."

  "Oh, sure," she murmured sarcastically. "And you can tell when a woman's having an orgasm, I suppose?"

  He'd always thought he could, until Greg moved into his bed. "No," he confessed. "I wouldn't be divorced otherwise."

  "Jesus!" Louise wasn't used to honesty in men. "You shouldn't admit to things like that."

  "I'm not very good at lying." He grinned as she pulled a face. "And I don't have the kind of personality that measures itself by the length of its penis." He tapped the side of his head. "I'm more interested in this. What makes people tick? Why are some of us a success and others a failure?" He let a moment pass. "How does Roy make money when his pub doesn't have any customers?"

  Louise reached for her jacket. "Not my problem. It was fine when I was there."

  "Who owns it?"

  "Maybe Roy does."

  Andrew shook his head. "No chance. It's prime development property. He'd be under siege from potential buyers ... and one of them would have persuaded him to sell by now."

  She threaded her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. "How come you know so much? I thought it was your mate who was writing the book."

  Andrew looked amused. "He consults with me ... so does George Gardener. Is that a disappointment? Did you choose me because you thought I was too ignorant to ask questions?"

  "Apart from George's, yours was the only address I had," she told him matter-of-factly, "and I wasn't going to talk to George. She'd have spilled the beans to Roy, and I don't need that at the moment."

  "Why not? You said he wasn't involved."

  "Different stuff," she said rather bleakly, "nothing to do with Cill or Grace." She pushed herself forward in the chair. "Are you going to tell George and your friend what I've said?"

  "It's why you came, isn't it?" He took her silence for assent. "They'll want to talk to you themselves, though. If what you've told me is true, then you're only guessing that Howard took his obsession with Cill too far ... but you know for a fact that Roy and his friends did. You were there," he said in a conscious echo of what she'd said earlier, "and gang rape is a better indication of sociopathic behavior than a bit of clumsy groping on a sofa."

  "She'd been geeing them up to it for weeks," she said with an edge of malice in her voice. "They were drunk as skunks and she talked dirty for half an hour to get them excited. I told her she was asking for trouble, but she wouldn't listen to me." Her mouth thinned as she remembered. "She was an arrogant little cow. She thought she knew everything. It drove me mad sometimes."

  Andrew watched her eyes smolder with irritation. "Then why try to look like her?"

  This was another question she was prepared for. "If she was beside me, you wouldn't think there was any similarity, except for the hair. And you can blame my mother for that. She was the one who dyed it to avoid difficult questions after we moved. Now no one knows me as anything other than a brunette-" she gave a small laugh-"and I'm too vain to let the gray show through."

  "You've been calling yourself Priscilla," he reminded her.

  She stood up and buttoned her jacket. "Yeah. Shouldn't have done, should I?" she said ingenuously. "George wouldn't've kept digging if I'd stuck with Daisy." She tucked her cigarettes into her pocket. "I changed to Priscilla when I was married to my first loser."

  Andrew pushed himself out of his chair. "Why?"

  "It sounded glamorous," she said with a strange wistfulness, "and that's crazy when you think what happened to Cill." She moved toward the door. "I guess Miss Brett was right, eh?"

  He moved ahead of her to turn the latch. "In what way?"

  " 'Louise Burton acts before she thinks,' " she said with a twisted smile. "Story of my life." In a surprisingly warm gesture, she offered him her hand. "I'm hoping you're one of the good guys. Otherwise I'll end up regretting this, too."

  He took the hand in his. "Are you safe to drive?"

  "Better be."

  She didn't give him time to respond, but turned away and headed up the mews. As she rounded the corner at the end she glanced back at him, her pale face lit by a streetlamp. It was impossible to read her expression from that distance, but there was no mistaking the small wave she gave him. He had no idea whether anything she'd told him was true but, as he returned the farewell courtesy, he was surprised at how much he wanted to believe her.

  Jonathan was working through some student essays in bed when the telephone rang at eleven-thirty. He had a surge of hope that it was Emma, until he picked it up and heard Andrew babbling excitedly about "something important." It was so out of character that he assumed his friend was drunk and told him to call back in the morning, but Andrew insisted on giving him bullet points of the conversation while they were still fresh in his mind. "She was pretty convincing."

  "Who was?"

  "Priscilla Fletcher. Larger than life in my house and calling herself Louise Burton." He heard Jonathan's intake of breath. "Right! So get your pencil out, you lazy sod, and take some notes."

  "Why can't you write them yourself?"

  "Because I'm only getting a tenth of your earnings and I'm bored with doing all the work."

  "You don't sound bored," said Jonathan dryly, pulling a notepad forward. "What did she do to you?"

  "Charmed me," said Andrew succinctly.

  Jonathan remembered the Good Samaritan act on Branksome Station. "And what's she stolen?"

  "Belief."

  "If Cill was in Grace's house, then she's the obvious suspect for the murder," said Jonathan thoughtfully, running his pencil down his notes. "She was big for her age, she was there, she was a disturbed adolescent ... recently raped with a possible history of sexual abuse. Put that with a volatile cocktail of hormones, and God knows what might have happened." He tapped the pencil against his teeth. "I can imagine a scenario where Grace tried to make her leave because she was worried about police involvement and Cill lost her temper and lashed out. The timing would work. She hid with Grace over the weekend, killed her on the Monday, then took herself off that night. It would explain why there were no sightings of her at the beginning ... although it's odd she wasn't spotted afterward."

  Andrew yawned at the other end. "Who took the bath and left ginger hair behind?"

  "Pass."

  "What about Howard fancying Cill? That sounded fairly convincing. She was an attractive girl."

  "She was thirteen."

  "Oh, come on! What's age got to do with anything? He was a retarded adolescent himself, so a grown woman's expectations would have terrified him. Maybe that's why he lost his rag when his grandmother told him to put himself about a bit. If he was besotted with Cill, he wouldn't have been interested in anyone else. More to the point, it would explain why he haunted Grace's house. Me
n'll do anything if there's half a chance of a shag at the end of it."

  "Speak for yourself," Jonathan said tartly.

  "I am," said Andrew with a laugh. "I abase myself regularly before beautiful women, and they all think I'm a comedian." He paused to take what sounded like a drink. "You should run this past your psychologist friend, but I'll put money on Louise being honest when she described Howard as a pervert. I'm not saying he was," he went on when Jonathan attempted to break in, "I'm saying that was her perception of him. She called him a 'slimeball,' and it sounded too strong to be a latter-day invention. I think it's what she genuinely felt at the time."

  Jonathan leaned his head against the pillows and rubbed the grit of tiredness from his eyes. "I need to sleep on this," he told Andrew. "I still don't understand why she came to you instead of me or George."

  Andrew explained about his business card and the handwritten address. "I wouldn't think that was her reason, though. I'm guessing she expected me to swallow it whole without asking questions ... either that, or it was a practice run."

  "For what? She can't change the details now, not without eyebrows being raised." He looked at his notes again. "What was the punchline, anyway? Which bit were you supposed to believe?"

  "Presumably that Howard was guilty and Roy and his gang weren't involved."

  "Then she was sent by Roy," said Jonathan matter-of-factly. "He told us she'd back him up."

  "Not very successfully. If Grace was already dead on the Tuesday, that exonerates Howard."

  "There's only Wynne's evidence that he didn't go out on the Monday night," Jonathan warned. "It's not something we can prove. She was never cross-examined in court because the prosecution plumped for the Wednesday."

  "Whose side are you on?" Andrew demanded. "Howard wouldn't have gone back if he knew Grace was dead ... or if he did, he wouldn't have run away like a bat out of hell and refused to tell anyone. This is a gift, for God's sake! It's precisely the piece of evidence you and George have been looking for."

  "That's what's making me suspicious," said Jonathan gloomily. "Why would Roy Trent tell Louise to say Tuesday? It doesn't make sense if he's read Disordered Minds."