They both watched as a shadowy figure crept along the hedge bordering the Jarretts’ house, tucking in behind a large shrub.
‘When’s the milkman due?’ Mariner asked.
‘The other days he’s come between three and four,’ said Millie. ‘Could be here any time.’ She took out a mobile.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Solomon’s got his mobile set to vibrate. It’s the signal. God, I hope those two have stayed awake.’
It seemed that no sooner had Millie replaced the phone than they heard the distant whirring of a milk float, and as they watched, dull headlights appeared at the end of the road. ‘Shit, this is it,’ Millie breathed, the tremor in her voice matching the pumping of adrenalin through Mariner’s own body.
Millie held out the walkie-talkie. ‘You want to give the signal, sir?’
‘No, this one’s yours.’
The milkman was making his tortuous way along the street, hopping off the float every few yards to make his deliveries. Finally he got to number nineteen and they watched as he hurried up the drive, deposited the bottles with a clink, and moved on. The milk float chugged its way to the end of the road and disappeared, leaving behind a deafening silence. Mariner and Millie stood rigid, binoculars fixed on the shrub below. Nothing happened. Minutes passed.
‘Christ, have we missed—?’ But as he spoke Mariner saw movement, as a dark figure emerged from the shadows and approached the front door.
‘Go, go, go!’ Millie hissed into the handset, and instantaneously the front garden was flooded with light. Mariner and Millie thundered down the stairs to the sound of shouting and scuffling outside, followed by a strangled cry. Mariner flung open the door to see Solomon lying on the ground and Evans running towards the street and after their culprit.
‘He stabbed me,’ Solomon was saying, in disbelief.
‘Call an ambulance!’ Mariner shouted back to Millie, already running. ‘And stay with him. Then call for backup.’ And he followed Evans, in hot pursuit of their perpetrator.
The chase was never going to be about speed, but in the darkness, the housing estate provided plenty of cover, and rounding the corner from Hill Crest their quarry seemed to have vanished into thin air. Without adequate support it was an impossible task to search the maze of roads and driveways in the dark, and when Mariner heard the distant sound of a car engine igniting, he knew they had lost. He and Evans returned to Hill Crest empty handed and despondent, arriving as Solomon was being driven off in the ambulance. By now Will Jarrett was awake and one or two neighbours had appeared to see what the commotion was. Officers in two squad cars were awaiting instructions, but Mariner shook his head. ‘It’s too late,’ he said.
‘We’ll get prints,’ said Millie. ‘Solomon’s sure his attacker wasn’t wearing gloves. Will he be all right?’
‘I’m sure he will,’ Mariner said. ‘We need to get to Brackleys. What time is it?’
‘It’s quarter to five sir. Brackleys won’t be open for hours,’ Millie said, uncertainly. ‘Why—?’
‘Then we need to get the manager out of bed.’ Mariner was pacing the pavement trying to work out what to do next. Tracking down the store manager would take time, as would getting him or her into work at this early hour to retrieve what Mariner needed. Suddenly he stopped. ‘No, it’s simpler than that. We just need to get back to the station. Meet me back there as soon as you can.’ And he was off running back down the street to pick up his car.
Mariner had a head start on Millie . . . so that he had already found what he wanted from Tony Knox’s desk and was hurrying back down the stairs when he met her coming up.
‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘All we need now is a piece of luck. Come with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll find out.’
Driving too fast through the suburbs, Mariner drew up in a narrow street of terraced houses.
‘I don’t understand. What are we doing here?’ Millie asked.
‘Hitting lucky,’ said Mariner, with some satisfaction and Millie followed his line of vision to a where a silver Honda was parked some way down the road, its boot open, while the driver loaded things in. ‘I didn’t know if she would still be living at this address, but for once we’ve had a break.’
‘Pam?’ Millie was mystified. ‘But she’s the cleaner.’
‘That’s a relatively new career direction for her,’ Mariner said. ‘Up until recently she was a wedding coordinator at Brackleys.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Anna’s friend Becky asked me to cancel Charles and Lottie’s wedding, so yesterday I went to do it. On the wall there was a certificate, for planner of the year, awarded to Pamela Rasen. There was something familiar about that name, and then, this morning, it came to me. I remembered a phone call that Tony made to the ballet school mother whose child had died. Jonquil’s an unusual name, and I saw it again, in the crematorium book of remembrance. Jonquil Rasen died exactly six years ago.’
‘How did you know she would turn up this morning?’ Millie asked.
‘Remember what Bonnington said when we asked him what was special about Wednesdays? He said: my house is clean. That was the day she cleaned his house and made full use of his computer.’
‘But she gave me the names of her clients and Bonnington wasn’t one of them.’
Mariner shot her a smile. ‘Do you really think she’d have handed you that?’
‘And what about Kerrigan? She gave us him, too.’
‘Of course she did; to direct us away from her. She was following Lucy and must have witnessed the altercation with her outside the health centre. She knew she could use it to implicate him. He was never on the estate at the time she said he was.’
‘But why would she hold Lucy and Nina responsible for her daughter’s death?’ As Millie spoke, there was a bang from across the road as Pamela Rasen slammed down the boot of her car and went back onto the house, closing the front door behind her.
‘Time to go and find out,’ said Mariner, releasing his seat belt.
‘How do we play this, boss?’ Millie asked.
‘Carefully,’ said Mariner.
* * *
Pamela Rasen seemed remarkably composed, and not overtly surprised to see Millie and Mariner on her doorstep, even at this hour. She showed them into a compact and sparsely furnished lounge, the fireplace dominated by dozens of photographs of a young girl at various stages of development, instantly recognisable from her thick, red curly hair.
‘Would you like a drink, some tea perhaps?’ she offered politely.
‘No, thank you,’ said Mariner.
‘I’m parched, do you mind if I—?’
‘No, go ahead. That’s fine.’ Now that they were here, they had all the time in the world. ‘Go with her,’ Mariner murmured, and Millie got up and followed Pam into the kitchen.
While Mariner waited, to the accompaniment of the kettle, cups and spasmodic background conversation, he picked up one of the pictures. He was still studying it when Millie and Pamela came back into the room. ‘She was a pretty little girl,’ he said, stating only what was obvious.
‘Jonquil was beautiful,’ Pamela Rasen agreed, sitting in the chair beside the fire and motioning for them to sit too. ‘Exquisite and delicate, exactly like the flower she was named for. But she had the life crushed out of her.’
‘How did it start, Pamela?’ Mariner asked, gently, moving across to sit beside Millie. As he nodded towards her she surreptitiously took out her notebook and pencil. But she needn’t have worried. Pamela Rasen was already lost in her own thoughts.
‘She always loved dancing,’ she said, of her daughter. ‘Practically as soon as she could walk she used to skip and dance around the house all the time. She was completely unselfconscious, you know. For her ninth birthday we took her to see The Nutcracker. From that point onwards she had her heart set on being a ballet dancer. So we enrolled her at ballet school to have proper lessons.’
‘Nina Silvero’s school,’ said Mariner.
‘It was a big mistake. Jonquil’s dad and I knew that she might never be a professional dancer, but Nina had to come out and say it right in front of her. “I really think you’re wasting your money,” she said to me while Jonquil was standing right beside me. “She’s too big and clumsy to ever be any good at it.” Imagine saying that in front of a child? I wanted to hit her. I wish I had.’
‘And how about Lucy Jarrett?’
For a moment she seemed puzzled. ‘Ah, Lucy Copeland and Julie-Ann Morris; Jonquil idolized them. They were the coolest girls in her class at St Felix. Anything they had, she had to have too. She thought they were so sophisticated. She knew that they called her “little fat Rasen.” They did it to her face, even though she wasn’t fat at all. And she laughed along, even though I knew it really hurt her. That was when she began to want to lose weight. She was heartbroken when she couldn’t be a cheerleader, but she knew that if she stuck to her diet she could fit into the costume and they would have to let her join. That was when it really started. At first it was all right. She just began eating lots more salads and cutting down on potatoes and biscuits. She shed a few pounds and you could see her confidence sky-rocket. We encouraged her at first too, because it seemed to make her so much happier about herself. But then, before we knew it, it had become an obsession. She was weighing herself every day before she went to school; ecstatic if she’d lost a few ounces and desperately upset if she had gained any weight at all. And if she had put on weight then she would hardly eat all day. By this time, she was routinely cutting out meals and we were doing everything to try and persuade her to eat. Even though she looked like a skeleton, she was still convinced that she was “little fat Rasen.”
‘The doctor wasn’t much help. She prescribed high calorie drinks but somehow we had to persuade Jonquil to drink them. We couldn’t afford to send her to any of these fancy clinics so in the end she was admitted to All Saints.’
‘The psychiatric hospital,’ said Mariner, horrified.
‘It was terrible seeing her there, with all those frightening people; our sweet little girl who had done nothing wrong.’
‘How long did it go on for?’
‘More than ten years, until her body couldn’t take any more. Her vital organs gradually began to shut down. For the last few days she was on a life support machine and we had to make the decision to allow the wonderful little girl we had brought into this world to slip away again.’
‘It must have been a terrible decision to have to make,’ Mariner said, quietly.
‘Bob always blamed me,’ she was wringing her hands. ‘He said I shouldn’t have encouraged the ballet, that I should have been realistic with Jonquil right from the start. But she was nine years old! What kind of age is that to shatter a little girl’s dreams? We grieved separately and then he left me. For a while my job kept me going but then the factory closed and I had to look for something else.’
‘You worked at Longbridge?’
Pam shook her head. ‘Carter’s Paints in West Heath. I was Mr Carter’s PA for twenty-three years. When I saw the wedding planner’s job it seemed perfect, as if it was meant to be. I was a good organizer, and if I couldn’t plan my own daughter’s wedding, I could plan other girls’ weddings for them instead. I thought it might help, but instead it made me angry and resentful . . .’
‘And then Rachel and Nina Silvero walked into the store.’
Her laugh was brittle. ‘Nina didn’t even recognise me. I’d had my hair done differently and I hadn’t aged as well as she had, of course. I’d had rather more stress in my life.’
‘She’d lost her husband,’ Mariner pointed out.
‘It’s not the same as losing a child. They were so smug and full of themselves. My daughter lay cold in the ground and they hadn’t a clue.’
‘So once you had their address and phone number, you started following Nina Silvero and making nuisance calls.’
‘I was planning to have it out with her. The first time I rang I was going to tell her who I was, and what she had done to Jonquil. But when she answered the phone I couldn’t go through with it, I couldn’t speak, and that was when I heard the fear in her voice, and it just came out: I’m going to make you suffer like she suffered. It made me feel so powerful and in control that the next night I did it again, except this time I didn’t even have to speak. Next time she and Rachel came into Brackleys I could see that it had affected her, and somehow it made me feel that I was getting some kind of justice for my little girl. I wanted to make her endure what Jonquil had, to feel persecuted for no good reason.’
‘When did you decide to take things further?’ Mariner asked.
‘To kill her, you mean? I saw in the paper that she got her MBE. An MBE for killing my daughter and I knew the time had come. I thought I’d help her celebrate.’
‘So you went round to her house.’
‘Yes. I’d read a lot about poisons by then and I knew that was how I would do it. I took round the bottle of wine.’
‘With Martin Bonnington’s fingerprint on it.’
‘Oh.’ She clearly hadn’t realised that. It had been an accident. ‘I almost took champagne, but I knew you’d think that was odd. Nobody drinks champagne alone, do they? It was the only bottle I had in the house; the one Martin had given me as a Christmas present. I doctored it before I went. Bob used to collect model soldiers, you know, the sort that you paint? But he used to make such a mess so I’d got him some paint stripper especially from work. I knew that it contained acid, and that it would do the trick quickly.’
‘So you just turned up on the doorstep?’
‘Yes, Nina was surprised to see me, but too polite to turn me away, of course. We went into the kitchen. I could tell that she wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible. I insisted on opening the wine, and that was when I reminded her that we had met before. She remembered Jonquil then, of course, and even asked after her. To her credit she seemed quite shocked to learn that my little girl was dead, but she played down her own part in it. Said she had only done what was kind. Kind? What would she know? The atmosphere was a little uncomfortable by then, but the wine was poured so I proposed a toast, to mothers and daughters, and she drank. It went perfectly.’
‘How could you stand by and watch someone die like that?’ Mariner was shocked.
‘Experience, Inspector. I’d done it before, except that in Jonquil’s case it had gone on for years. Have you ever had to stand by and watch a loved one slowly kill herself and all because of a few thoughtless words?’
‘Meanwhile you had run into Lucy Copeland too.’
‘I could hardly contain myself. Fate lending a hand again. No reason for Lucy to know who I was, of course. They liked us to stick to first name terms at Brackleys, because it’s more personal, and Lucy and I had never met before. All I had to do was confirm that she’d been a pupil at St Felix. I got to know her pretty well; that she hadn’t known her husband-to-be very long and that he worked away, so it was easy to judge the phone calls. The only thing now was that following both Nina and Lucy was taking such a lot of my time. I was late in a few times at work, so eventually they let me go. On the plus side it meant that there were no more distractions, and that was when I decided to set up as a domestic cleaner. It would allow me to be closer to Lucy. I put leaflets through some selected doors on the estate.’
‘And Martin Bonnington took the bait.’
‘Fate intervened again. He’s a sensitive soul, Martin, and he’d told me about his unrequited feelings for Lucy so I just capitalized on that situation. He was often out while I was cleaning so it was easy to use his computer. I may look like an old fogey but I’m quite IT literate, thanks to both of my last positions.’ She looked at Millie. ‘I don’t clean for all those other people.’
‘You must have had to be careful not to run into Lucy,’ Mariner said.
‘Oh, it wasn’t too hard. She was mostly out at work, and if
that smart car of hers was there I’d just ring Martin and rearrange my time. It hardly ever happened though.’
‘And when did you start adding thallium to her milk?’ Mariner asked.
‘A couple of months ago. I’d been to Lucy’s house a few times by then, just outside, sometimes before I went to work, and I’d see the milk standing there. I kept thinking, “I’d like to give you a taste of your own medicine.” I remembered from when we discussed the buffet arrangements that her husband was lactose intolerant, and saw the perfect opportunity. I knew all about thallium because I’d had to produce safety leaflets at work. I knew what it could do.’
‘Where did you get hold of it?’
‘I’d taken a few things from Carter’s for Bob’s soldiers. It was one of them. I read up on how much you should give and then I injected it into the milk; not too often but enough to make her feel ill.’
‘And Nina Silvero’s too?’
She smiled, pleased with her accomplishments. ‘Yes, some strategies worked well for them both.’
‘Like the anniversary flowers,’ Mariner said.
‘I thought it was a nice touch to add in the photograph to Lucy’s.’
‘And were you planning the same end for her?’
‘I hadn’t really decided,’ Pam frowned, contemplating it anew. ‘In many ways, there seemed no need. The thallium was going quite nicely and her relationship with her husband was also deteriorating satisfactorily, I was happy to sit back and let things take their course. Jonquil’s Pound Puppy was perhaps too close to home, but I wanted to make her think about my Jonquil again. I didn’t think she would really remember.’ She looked up at Mariner. ‘It was her exam mascot, you know.’
While she’d been talking, the tea that Pam had been so eager for earlier sat untouched, but now she reached across and picked up the cup.
‘All I wanted was justice for my poor, beautiful daughter, and now I feel as if my work is done.’ She lifted the cup to her lips as she was speaking those final words, and too late Mariner realised the implication of them.
Married Lies (Reissue) Page 27