Disordered Minds

by Minette Walters

  In reference to the argument I had with Cill on the afternoon of Friday, May 29, it was no different from the ones that had gone before. She and I are forceful people and there was a lot of shouting. My recollection is that she swore profusely and called me a "Victorian parent," "Hitler," "Methuselah, " and accused me of "playing God." She then turned on her mother and called her a "telltale creep" and a "sniveling bitch." She also accused us of trying to live her life, and of caring more about what the other parents at school would say than we did about her.

  I insisted on an explanation for the fight with Louise Burton. When she refused, I asked her if Louise's version was true-namely that she'd tried to persuade Louise to truant again. Cill began throwing things about the room and I felt I had no option but to give her three lashes of the belt. I then sent her to her room and instructed her mother to make sure she remained there. It was an unhappy experience for all of us, but I was confident that the outcome would be the same as usual: Cill would apologize in the morning and her behavior would improve in the short term. Our difficulty, as ever, was how to deal with her behavior in the long term, specifically the truanting.

  I left for work at eight o'clock [Friday] and at that time Cill was in her bedroom. As a foreman in the engineering department at Brackham & Wright's, I oversee a night workforce of approximately fifty. Louise Burton's father, Robert, has similar responsibilities in the packing department. A female work colleague of mine, Deborah Handley, noticed that I was upset on arrival and asked me if something was wrong. Deborah has two daughters in their late teens and I've regularly asked her advice about Cill's behavior. During the shift I explained what had happened and told Deborah that Jean and I were at our wits' end. She suggested I talk to Robert Burton and find out what the fight was really about. I believe her words were, "If Cill was too worked up to invent a reason, then I bet there's more to it than meets the eye."

  I approached Robert in the canteen at approximately one o'clock in the morning. He was unwilling to talk to me, claiming the school's punishment showed that Cill was at fault, not Louise. I pointed out that Louise's version of events was very convenient, since she knew how worried we and Miss Brett had been about Cill's truanting. He asked me if I was accusing his daughter of lying, and when I said it was a possibility, he became abusive and a fight broke out. I did not do this to draw attention to myself and create an alibi or to disguise any bruises from a previous encounter with Cill. It happened as a result of my deep concern and anxiety for my daughter's welfare, which boiled over when Robert Burton referred to her as "a cheap little tart who deserved what she got."

  I have no idea why he made this remark unless Louise had already told him about the alleged rape. If so, he had a responsibility to pass that information to myself and my wife.

  In conclusion, I have accounted for my movements during the night of Friday, May 29, and Saturday, May 30, 1970. Also, my fifty-minute drive on the morning of Saturday, May 30, when I went to Branksome Station and Bournemouth Central in the hope of finding my daughter. I confirm that I know nothing about Cill's disappearance and that I am ignorant of her current whereabouts.

  David Trevelyan

  By the time Billy had finished reading and laid the pages on the coffee table, his hands were shaking. "God!" he said with feeling. "Do you think Mr. Trevelyan's right? Do you think my folks did know about the rape?"

  Assuming he was addressing her, Sasha Spencer demurred. "David's never been convinced the rape happened," she said. "He thinks your sister was lying to shift attention away from her part in Cill's suspension. Jean believes it, though, and she beats herself up regularly for being a lousy mother. It's a very sad situation. Rightly or wrongly-and for different reasons-they each hold themselves responsible."

  Billy lowered his face into his hands. "It certainly happened," he muttered. "I was there, I saw it. They took it in turns ... kept kicking her ... she had blood all down her legs. It makes me sick just thinking about it."

  Rachel saw the distaste on Sasha's face. "He was ten years old and they'd filled him with vodka," she said, leaping to Billy's defense, "so he didn't understand what was going on. He thought it was a fight. If the police had included him in the questioning, it would have been different, but no one knew he'd been with Cill and Louise that day."

  "Cill was that scared of her dad, she said she'd kill us if we ever breathed a word," Billy went on unhappily, "so I never did. And it wasn't until a bloke at school told me his mum had read it in the newspapers that I found out Louise had told the police ... I didn't even know what rape meant-he had to explain it to me ... and that was a good two months after Cill vanished. It wasn't mentioned in our house. Nothing was." He dropped a hand to David Trevelyan's statement. "I didn't know Mr. Trevelyan cared about his kid that much ... I didn't know my dad and him had a fight ... I sure as hell didn't know Dad was calling Cill a tart before anyone knew she was missing."

  There was a long silence.

  Sasha opened her notebook again. "Why is that important?" she asked.

  "He said Cill 'deserved what she got.' I think it means he knew about the rape."

  Sasha eyed him with a frown. "I still don't understand why it's important. It may not reflect well on your parents, but it doesn't mean they had anything to do with Cill running away."

  Billy took a printout of his father's email from his shirt pocket. "Read this," he said harshly, "then ask yourself what else he's been lying about. You don't tell a man his kid deserves what she gets if you think he's abusing her ... and you damn well talk to the police if you think that man's been after your own daughter as well."

  *22*

  25 MULL1N STREET, HIGHDOWN, BOURNEMOUTH

  THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2003, MIDDAY

  Jonathan suggested they sit in the garden so that he could inspect the rear of George's house, but she told him there was only one chair and no table. She seemed depressed, and he thought it sad that she had no one to share her garden with. He said the day was too glorious to miss and insisted on moving furniture out from the kitchen. Puffs of high cloud drifted across a turquoise sky and the scent of wisteria on her neighbor's wall was heavy on the air. He collected a cushion from the sitting room and tucked it behind George's back, worried about the signs of pain and weariness that were showing round her eyes. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," she said. "I'm just aching a bit."

  He took the chair next to her. "You look tired."

  "It goes with the job. I'm on nights again."

  "I hope you're not playing the martyr," he warned her. "I'm investing a lot of time and energy into this book."

  She gave a faint smile. "You're such a bully."

  "I've been taking lessons from Andrew. Have you been to the doctor?"

  "I'm going tomorrow."

  He didn't press it. Instead he produced a printout of Andrew's bullet points which he'd emailed George at the beginning of the week. He began with what could be proved. If, as George's previous neighbor had told her, her house was an exact replica of Grace's, then Louise could certainly have seen into the sitting room through the French windows. Jonathan was less convinced about the girls entering through a gate in the fence at the back in order to truant. He nodded at George's rear boundary. "Their only access would have been through other people's gardens," he pointed out, "so why were they never seen by Grace's neighbors?"

  George sorted through a folder that she'd asked him to fetch from her sitting room. "I think I've solved that." She drew out a photocopy of a street map and spread it on the table. "I found this in the library. It's from an early A-Z of Bournemouth, printed in 1969." She took up a pencil and placed the tip on Mullin Street. "This is where the houses were demolished to make the apartment block and, as near as I can get it, this-" she drew a small circle-''was Grace's house. If I'm right, then there was a narrow cul-de-sac at the back which was reached from Bladen Street." She ran her pencil up a road at right angles. "The alleyway doesn't exist anymore, because these two houses adjacent to
Bladen Street appear to have extended their gardens, and the flats have garages along the boundary ... but it was obviously there in 1970."

  Jonathan gave a nod of approval. "Good stuff."

  George pulled a face. "It doesn't prove anything. What about fingerprints? The police would have found some if Cill had been there for any length of time. Children's fingers are smaller than adults' so, if juvenile prints had been there, the police couldn't have missed them. Particularly Louise's. Miss Brett said she was a skinny little thing. Even if she didn't go inside, she'll have touched the windows when she looked in. It's the natural thing to do."

  "Did Lovatt have any ideas?"

  "He said eyebrows would have been raised by children's prints. He also thinks there would have been a comparison set on file as Cill's would have been lifted from her bedroom in case a body was found."

  "So Louise is lying?"

  "That's his view."

  Jonathan linked his hands and stretched them toward the sky, cracking the joints at the back of his neck. "Louise told Andrew he'd have to explain it himself," he murmured, "which was very clever of her, because he's a competitive little man and he loves winning."

  George tut-tutted. "You shouldn't keep drawing attention to his height. You'll give him a complex."

  "Fat chance!"

  "He thinks that's why his wife left him."

  Jonathan relaxed again, dropping his arms to the table-top and favoring George with a grin. "I did what you told me to do and went to see her a couple of days ago. She's bored with the parasitic stud, stressed to the eyeballs with work and kept asking me if Andrew had a girlfriend."

  "What did you say?"

  "That she didn't deserve a second chance because she was a two-timing bitch."

  "You didn't!"

  "Bloody did."

  "No, you didn't."

  He laughed. "OK! I may not have used those exact words, but I did say Andrew was a prince among men and if she had a blind bit of sense she'd recognize the fact. I also said he'd never had a bad word for her and was eating his heart out because she and the children were the best thing that ever happened to him."

  George's eyes sparkled with delight. "What did she say?"

  "That both girls had told her he'd had a woman in the house on Saturday, and the place stank of smoke on Sunday morning." He smiled at her deflated expression. "What's wrong with that? It means he's desirable."

  "I hope you explained."

  He shook his head. "I said the ladies were queuing up for him so she'd better get a move on."

  "Do you think it'll work?" she asked, her soft heart visible in the pleasure that showed in her face.

  "Should do, assuming he hasn't been seduced by Louise."

  "Don't be silly!"

  Jonathan tapped the bullet points. "He's very keen to believe her. His theory is that the house was cleaned either after Cill left it or after Grace was murdered."

  "Who by?"

  "Anyone you like. If it was after Cill left, then it might have been Grace herself. If it was after Grace died, then it was her murderer."

  George pondered for a moment. "Why weren't Howard's prints wiped away at the same time?"

  "They would have been, but he left enough on the Wednesday to satisfy the police. There's a clear suggestion in the prosecution case that part of his attempt to cast the blame elsewhere was to clean his prints from anything that looked suspicious-such as the bathroom taps-but that he was too stupid to do a thorough job."

  She looked doubtful again. "It would have meant him using the lavatory after he found Grace's body. Do you think that's likely?"

  "Very likely," said Jonathan dryly. "He probably vomited into it."

  "What about Grace's prints?"

  Jonathan eyed her with approval. "What about them?"

  "If her murderer had cleaned up, there wouldn't have been any."

  "Go on."

  "Wouldn't the police have noticed?" she asked with a frown. "I mean, if they were arguing that Howard wasn't thorough enough to remove all of his, then Grace's should have been all over the place. Do you see the point I'm making? It would have been very peculiar if the only prints found were Howard's. The defense team would have picked up on it straight away because it would have supported his story."

  Jonathan pulled a letter from his briefcase. "That's more or less what I thought, so I wrote to Howard's solicitor first thing Monday morning and this is his reply. I'll read the relevant paragraph ... it's quite brief: 'By recollection, the main sets were Grace Jefferies's and Howard's. In addition, policemen touched objects in the hallway and kitchen before the house was sealed. These prints were accounted for. Two or three unidentifiable sets were found on objects in the sitting room, which was considered unusual (most houses contain many more) until it became clear that Grace was a recluse. These sets were not considered suspicious. There were a number of partial prints about the house, which were thought to be Grace's, but they were too degraded for comparison.' " He looked up. "The rest is a diatribe about my suggestion that the defense team was negligent."

  "Oh dear!"

  He consulted the letter again. " 'We made every effort to substantiate our client's story, but I remain in no doubt that the verdict was a correct one.' " He pushed the letter across the table. "So unless they were even more negligent than I painted them," he said lightly, "which will be hotly disputed by my friend here, then Louise is lying and Cill was never there or-and this is Andrew's view-Grace cleaned the house of Cill's presence herself."

  "Why?"

  "Because someone told her she'd be arrested if the police discovered she'd been harboring a runaway."

  "Who?"

  Jonathan shrugged. "Anyone you like," he said again, "but Andrew's guessing Mr. or Mrs. Burton."

  It was only when Rachel asked Billy to make a pot of tea that Sasha Spencer found out what he really believed, and she made a mental note never again to make assumptions about protective wives. Rachel waited until the door closed, then leaned forward and spoke urgently into the silence. "He's not going to tell you this because he's trying to convince himself he's imagining it. He's been surfing the Net researching recovered-memory syndrome. Half the sites talk about it being a recognized psychological phenomenon, the other half say the memories are invented ... and he doesn't know which is the case. I keep telling him the false stuff comes out of dodgy therapy sessions, but he doesn't want to believe me. He's off his head because he can't sleep, and he's worried he's developed a thing about his dad because Robert keeps lecturing him about the firemen being on strike..."

  George closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun while Jonathan explained Andrew's theory. "It's in bullet points again," he said, extracting another sheet of paper. "Cill took refuge at Grace's on the Friday night ... Louise saw her there on the Saturday morning ... she told her parents about it-probably on the Saturday afternoon-"

  "I thought she told them on the Wednesday," George broke in.

  Jonathan put a finger on the line and looked up. "Andrew says she never specified a day, only implied the Wednesday. Now, he thinks it's more likely she owned up after the police questioning because her mother had been so insistent the Burtons didn't know where Cill was."

  "OK. Next point."

  He returned to the page. "One of the Burton parents went round to Grace's ... read Cill the riot act and told her to go home ... put the fear of God into Grace about harboring truants and runaways ... became anxious when Cill remained missing ... started to lose it when Louise reported the state of Grace's house on the Tuesday or Wednesday ... and lost it completely when Grace's body was found. Result: withdrawal of Louise from school in case she said anything, total clampdown on the story in the Burton household and enormous effort to distance themselves from Mullin Street and the Trevelyans."

  "So what does he think happened to Cill?"

  "Pass."

  "Who killed Grace?"

  "Pass."

  George shielded her eyes from the sun and squ
inted at him. "They'd have known by the Monday morning that Cill hadn't returned home," she pointed out, "so why weren't they worried about Louise spilling the beans at school that day?"

  "They told her not to."

  She eyed him with amusement. "Did she always do what she was told? They couldn't stop her truanting, don't forget."

  "They threatened her with the police. Billy said she was frightened of them."

  George shook her head. "I've never heard such a half-baked theory. There's only one explanation for why she wasn't confined to the house until the Wednesday: she didn't tell her parents she'd seen Cill in Grace's house until after she saw the blood on the window."

  Jonathan gave his head a thoughtful scratch. "Maybe," he mused.

  "What other explanation is there?"

  "The parents were worried someone would come asking questions if Louise didn't turn up on the Monday ... she was threatened with a thrashing if she didn't keep her mouth shut ... they told her she was to blame for not telling the police where Cill was ... she was a fluent liar and was used to keeping secrets, so they were confident she'd keep that one."

  "What sort of secrets?"

  Jonathan shrugged. "The rape? The reason for the fight?"

  "Why didn't they make her go in on the Wednesday? All the same reasons apply."

  "The circumstances had changed. The blood on the window was a secret too far and she threw a fit."

  "Assuming she's telling the truth," said George cynically. "I'm not as easily seduced as Andrew."

  "She's an incredible flirt."

  "Oh dear!" George sighed. "Please don't tell me Andrew fell for her."

  "Probably," said Jonathan. "He's a randy little beast-short arses always are-but I meant, she flirted with information. She told him it was Howard who did it, but what she was really doing was hooking him into her father and Roy Trent."

  Rachel pulled nervously at her hair. "This isn't easy," she said. "I've known Robert for ages and I'd never have thought ... Billy's saying now that he doesn't want the girls anywhere near him. He's even wondering if his dad had a go when they were younger. I keep telling him he can't have done because they never stayed overnight with the folks, and his mum was always around in the daytime. But it's funny, looking back. It was Billy who insisted they had to come home before bedtime ... and I never really thought about it till now. I asked him the other day if it was because of all this-" she made a vague gesture toward Robert's email-"and he said, no, he'd forgotten. He just needed to know his kids were safe with me while he was on nights shifts. He thought it was because he was afraid of fire breaking out ... now he thinks it was these unrecovered memories working like instinct. That's weird, isn't it?"