The Anna McColl Mysteries Box Set 2

by Penny Kline

  ‘He wasn’t dead when I left him,’ he said. ‘Someone might have found him before it was too late.’

  ‘He’d broken both legs.’

  His face was expressionless. ‘You see, I only wanted to talk, make him admit what he’d done, but he wouldn’t listen.’ His eyes left my face for a second, as he looked at the steep drop, but I was too frozen to the spot to move. ‘God’s will, that’s what he kept on saying. You must try to see it as God’s will. He even wanted us to pray!’

  He was small, but he looked strong. On the other hand, he was much older than I was. If I made a sudden movement, darted past him and started running down the path would he be able to catch up? First I would ask a few questions, try to get him off guard.

  ‘You realized Clare had seen you in Tom Luckham's car?’

  ‘I don’t care about myself,’ he said softly, ‘but I couldn’t leave Marion all alone.’

  I edged a little closer to him. ‘Tom had given himself his insulin but —’

  ‘Tricia was a diabetic. Exertion uses up carbohydrates, causing a drop in blood sugar.’

  ‘What happened to Tom’s breakfast? You made sure he never had a chance to eat it.’ My voice sounded unnaturally calm. It was as if I was listening to somebody else talking. ‘If his car was found in a lay-by how did you get back to Bristol that day?’

  ‘Walked to the Wells Road, then hitched a lift. Told the bloke in the car my van had broken down farther back. A German bloke, he was, on holiday, travelling round the West Country.’ Suddenly he grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me closer. ‘That’s the reason she waved him down, noticed the registration, knew he’d probably be gone before anyone got round to asking about hitchhikers.’ His face was screwed up in pain. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but I say unto you … ’ Suddenly he broke off, realizing his mistake.

  ‘She waved him down,’ I repeated. ‘It wasn’t you who came here with Tom. Marion told him you were missing.’

  His face was very close to mine. His eyes were brown with hazel flecks. ‘Tom’s daughter was still alive,’ he said. ‘He and Erica still had a daughter.’

  ‘It was Marion who tried to pull Sally into her car? Look, I can help you, I know I can. Marion wasn’t thinking straight. Her grief, the pain of losing Tricia.’ But he wasn’t interested in anything I might have to say. He had relaxed the pressure on my wrist, but when I moved slightly it tightened again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, staring at the drop below us, ‘but I have to think of Marion.’ Sweat was pouring down his face. He was pulling me backwards, we were very close to the edge, and the rock under my feet felt as slippery as ice. I glanced up at the sky, hoping to make Wesley do the same. Then it happened. He let go of my wrist and the sudden freedom made me lose my balance. With arms flailing, I tried to force myself to defy gravity. It was no good. I was suspended in space, like a diver on a high board, but there was no water below me, just shale and rocks. The sheer drop must have been less than ten feet but it jarred my whole body and as soon as I landed I started to slide. Further down a group of rocks jutted out of the scree. If they stopped me from falling any further … but I had no control over where I slid … and I was gaining speed all the time. Instinctively I tried to shield my head, flinging out a leg in a useless attempt to alter the position of my body, feeling the impact as my shoulder made contact with one of the rocks. My head jerked to one side. I heard a voice calling my name … from a long way away … then everything went black.

  Chapter Eighteen

  He was kneeling beside me. We were halfway down the slope, near the part where the stones gave way to rough grass and scrubby bushes. He must have edged his way across to where I was lying. It couldn’t have been easy.

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ His voice was different, softer. ‘Anna? It’s me. Wesley’s gone.’

  I struggled to open my eyes wider. ‘James?’

  ‘No, don’t say anything. Look, I’ll have to call an ambulance, but first we’d better —’

  ‘No, don’t go.’ I managed to haul myself onto one elbow. ‘My arm, it’s only my arm. How can we get down to the bottom?’

  He looked doubtful. ‘You may be injured more badly than you think.’

  ‘No, I can tell. If you crawled across, that means we can both crawl back. Where’s Wesley?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? He never saw me. Look, it’s not so steep here, you go first and I’ll make sure you don’t fall.’

  The pain in my arm was getting worse but there was nothing much wrong with the rest of me, apart from a searing headache and the feeling that all my exposed skin had been rubbed raw. Very slowly I started moving towards the grass, searching for places where the stones flattened out a little, dragging myself a few feet, then tensing, waiting for my body to start sliding all over again.

  James was slightly below me and making good progress. He had hold of my good arm and with his free hand he was reaching out to grab hold of some exposed tree roots. ‘It’s all right, we’re nearly there, just a few more yards.’

  My head was thudding. Everything looked blurred. Clutching at the grass, I could feel it slipping through my hand, then James pulling me clear of the stones, and dragging me onto the grass. ‘Try and sit up,’ he said. ‘Lean against me, you’ll feel better when you can see where we are.’

  We were still fairly high up. There was no path, but the grassy slope was in ridges and there were plenty of bushes to hang on to. I looked back the way we had come, then up at the rocks at the top.

  ‘How you feeling?’ James was wiping the sweat off his face.

  ‘All right, I’m all right, but how did you know …’ Then the bile rose in my throat and I swung my head to one side and threw up on the grass.

  *

  We were on our way back to Bristol. My arm had stiffened up, my whole body ached from head to foot and I couldn’t stop shivering, but somehow we had managed to get back to the road. Anything was better than being left there, alone. My head still ached, but the muzziness had been replaced by an odd feeling of euphoria.

  ‘But how did you know where I was?’ I asked.

  James was driving too fast. He changed down to overtake an ancient blue van. ‘Jude, at the hostel, overheard Wesley telling someone answering your description I’d probably gone to the gorge. Look, are you sure you’re OK, only it’ll be another half hour before we reach casualty.’

  ‘You saw me with Wesley?’

  He nodded. ‘Then I watched you fall. I was certain somebody had gone with him that day — Clare had seen someone in the car — but I thought it was Livvy. She was crazy about Dad, right from when he first started going to Stephen’s church. Then when he found a publisher for her poems.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I read one of them. It scared me stiff.’

  ‘Really?’ He turned his head, wondering perhaps if I was suffering from concussion. ‘How stupid could Livvy get, but I suppose if it made her happy. Then, one day, she heard him laughing.’ He turned his head to make sure I understood the enormity of what had happened. ‘He’d invited a few people back to the house, old friends from the days before he “saw the light”. Livvy’d called round to see Mum, then she left and Dad started doing one of his famous Dylan Thomas impersonations. It was crazy, he was like two people. The great philanthropist, puffed up with his own importance, but when he saw his artist friends he could just slip back into how he used to be. Livvy came back to the house, she’d forgotten her scarf or something, and overheard the whole thing.’

  ‘He was reciting one of her poems?’

  ‘What a bastard. Livvy wasn’t the only one who’d like to have hit back at him, but try explaining something like that to the cops. And it was so much easier to call his death an accident, and wrap up the whole thing with the minimum of effort and paperwork.’

  I was thinking about Livvy. She had found out what Tom was really like but it still hadn’t broken her attachment
to him. After he died she had been able to wipe the unpleasant memory out of her head, and idealize him even more. Or had she? Then I thought about Wesley. Had he really believed a second death at the gorge would be seen as another unfortunate accident? But I doubted if he had worked things out that clearly.

  James had gone silent. I asked if he had known Clare a long time.

  ‘Clare? No, only since Dad died. I had this idea he could have been Cain’s father, but it wasn’t right although Clare let the woman who runs the nursery think Dad was responsible.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, she’d have told me. Clare’s OK, but she can’t keep anything a secret for long. She doesn’t know who the father is. A one-night stand, some college student? Sometimes she studies Cain’s face and tries to see a likeness, but it’s best not to know, that way you can avoid all the hassle at the benefit office.’

  ‘Stephen seems fond of the baby,’ I said.

  ‘Stephen Bryce’' He laughed. ‘You know Clare, loves being the centre of attention. I guess that’s why a lot of girls have babies. First Dad, then Stephen and Marion Young. Listen, you’re sure it was Wesley who killed Dad?’

  ‘Not Wesley,’ I said, ‘it was Marion.’

  ‘Marion?’

  ‘He wanted me to think he was responsible, but he let slip the fact that it had been Marion who hitched a lift back to Bristol that day. I think her real intention was to force your father to face up to why Tricia committed suicide. I visited her once but she gave me an entirely false impression of how she felt.’

  ‘Wasn’t that exactly what she intended?’

  ‘Yes, of course. She wanted me to think your father had committed suicide, and she kept going on about how Clare should be left to stand on her own two feet.’

  ‘She didn’t want you to guess who had been the passenger in Dad’s car. It was Dad who encouraged Tricia to train as a doctor. He should’ve gone into politics, that way he’d really have been able to control other people’s lives. What d’you suppose Wesley and Marion will do now? Make a run for it, or give themselves up to the cops?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I was wondering if Marion had actually pushed Tom Luckham or if, like me, he had simply lost his footing. Was Tom really responsible for Tricia’s suicide, or had Wesley and Marion gone along with the plan for a place at medical school, then blamed Tom as a way of coming to terms with their own guilt and remorse?

  We were passing a field with six or seven horses, two of them foals. One of them was on its side and I remembered how, as a small child, I had seen a horse lying down and burst into tears, thinking it was dead.

  ‘I think it was Marion who tried to pull Sally into the car,’ I said.

  ‘What! Did Sally tell you that?’

  ‘No, she was confused, afraid of making a mistake, making people even more impatient with her.’

  ‘She doesn’t really know Marion and Wesley. I suppose she must have seen Marion in church, but she doesn’t go any more, not since Dad died. God, I should have listened to her. To be honest I thought she might have made up the whole abduction thing, then I kind of half-persuaded her it could have been Livvy.’

  ‘So she made up how she remembered the “abductor’s” perfume.’

  He shrugged. ‘Livvy always drenches herself in the stuff. I guess she’s some kind of hygiene freak.’

  The windscreen was misting up. He turned up the heater and switched on the fan. ‘It was because of Dad that Mum started boozing,’ he said. ‘After he died I thought … Oh, I don’t know what I thought, but it was too late by then, she was hooked. I hated him, thought she was well shot of him, but I guess she didn’t see it that way. She was miserable when he was alive but after he’d gone, if anything she was worse.’

  The countryside had given way to new housing developments, a children’s playground, an estate agent and a shop selling flowerpots and garden gnomes. If the traffic was not too heavy we would be at the hospital in ten to fifteen minutes. I started to thank James for following Wesley’s van, but he interrupted to say it was more out of curiosity than because he thought I was in any real danger.

  ‘That time on the Downs,’ I said, ‘when you drove up close behind me …’

  ‘I wanted to make sure you came back. Guessed you were the kind of person who reacts strongly to having pressure put on them.’

  ‘You know, for a time I thought you and Clare …’

  ‘Then Buzz put you straight.’ He drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a long, despairing sigh. ‘Look, I know this isn’t the best time to ask, but is there anything you can do for my mother?’

  *

  ‘I thought you’d be in bed,’ said Chris. ‘If I’d known they were going to let you out I wouldn’t have bothered.’ She opened the box of chocolates she had given me and started studying the selection. ‘Strawberry Creme. Fudge Delight. Anyway, I can drive you home and you can tell me all about it.’

  I opened my mouth to explain, then saw Fay Somers coming through the swing doors at the end of the ward. She was carrying a huge bunch of flowers, wrapped in cellophane. How long had everyone expected me to stay in hospital? A couple of nights, just for a broken arm, had seemed excessive, but the nurse had said they wanted to make sure there was no concussion.

  Chris looked up, saw Fay approaching, dressed in a long, floral skirt, and white skinny-rib top, and muttered: ‘Who the fuck is that?’

  ‘Fay,’ I said loudly, taking the flowers and holding them to my nose. ‘You are kind.’

  ‘How are you?’ She looked genuinely concerned. ‘This is all my fault. If I hadn’t told you I’d seen James Luckham.’

  ‘I’m really glad you did.’ I introduced Chris and she gave Fay one of her gushing smiles.

  ‘So you’re feeling better?’ said Fay. ‘When I heard what had happened … Jill told me. James had spoken to Clare and —’

  ‘Who’s Clare?’ said Chris.

  ‘Just a girl with a baby. I’ll tell you about it later.’

  She sighed. ‘All right, I know when I’m not wanted.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly.’ But both she and Fay looked as if they were about to leave.

  Howard Fry was standing just inside the swing doors, staring at my bed. He raised a hand but stayed where he was.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ said Fay, jerking her head in the direction of the swing doors. ‘Look, can I give you a ring in a day or two? I’d love for us to get together before I go home.’

  ‘Yes, of course, make sure you do, or I will.’

  Chris bent to give me a kiss. ‘Come on,’ she muttered, ‘I’m not going till you tell me who he is. It’s your policeman, isn’t it? God, why didn’t you tell me he looked so stunningly forbidding?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  We had left the city and were heading north.

  ‘The Cotswolds,’ said Howard. ‘Well drive to one of the beauty spots, have a look round a few junk shops, then eat a large cream tea.’

  ‘It’ll be packed out with tourists.’

  ‘So we’ll have to wait our turn. Now, tell me about your vicar. He never really thought Tom Luckham had been murdered, just wanted you to persuade his wife to come back to him?’

  ‘I doubt if it was quite that simple. The trouble is, people open up, confide in you and you start believing they’ve told you the whole truth. Stephen thought Ros wanted a divorce — because she was so angry he’d resigned from his job — and Ros thought, now he’d given up his parish, he had no more use for her.’

  ‘Some marriage,’ said Howard unsympathetically.

  ‘Oh, come on, people often find it hard to talk to each other. He once asked me if I’d ever done something I really regretted.’

  ‘And have you?’

  I ignored this. ‘I think Stephen meant, at the time he left the Church, he should have made more effort to save his marriage. Or maybe he wished he’d never written his book.’

  Howard pulled into a lay-by and reached for a road atlas lying on the back
seat. ‘Wesley Young’s disappeared; he said, ‘and his wife. The house is empty and none of the neighbours has any idea where they’ve gone.’

  ‘But you’ll catch up with them,’ I said, ‘and then what will happen? If you want my opinion, Geena Robson going missing reawakened all Marion’s suppressed feelings about her own daughter. Sally’s attempted abduction was never a serious threat, just a way of frightening Erica. Her daughter was still alive, Marion’s was dead.’

  ‘All surmise, Anna, but no doubt you’ll be able to persuade the jury the balance of Mrs Young’s mind was disturbed. In any case, just for the present we’re more interested in Geena Robson. She’s been found.’

  ‘Oh, no! Why didn’t you tell me? Where was she?’

  ‘No, don’t look like that, she’s alive.’

  ‘Alive? You mean, she’s all right? Who found her?’

  He was turning the pages of the map. ‘She phoned her mother. Apparently she’d been living in Lincoln with some man she met in the central library a couple of months before they ran off together.’

  ‘But I thought she was seen climbing into a woman’s car.’

  ‘Yes, well we all make mistakes. Who’s to tell, just by looking at the back of someone’s head. Hippie type, with a ponytail and steel-framed glasses.’

  ‘Why didn’t she get in touch with her mother before?’

  Howard shrugged. ‘You never met the mother. To listen to her you’d have thought she and Geena were inseparable. Most parents become expert in deluding themselves, I suppose it’s the only way they can survive.’

  It was a cool breezy day, but inside the car it felt pleasantly warm. In the distance I could just make out the two bridges across the Severn Estuary and, on the other side, Newport and the grey strip of Welsh coast. Howard stretched out a hand and touched my arm.

  ‘Still hurting?’

  I shook my head. ‘James thought Livvy Pope had killed his father.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Livvy Pope?’ His face was only inches away from mine. ‘And if James Luckham knew something why didn’t he come and tell us?’