‘I think I can.’
‘Well, it’s a Thursday today, isn’t it? So you’ll be at the church at seven for choir practice. I’ll bring the dress to you then. I’d like to see you refuse to pay for its dry cleaning in front of all of your friends.’
‘Sadly, I won’t be at choir practice tonight. I’m off to a football match in Highbury with some old friends. Goodbye, Mrs Potts.’
The line went dead, and Judith shivered as though someone had walked over her grave, which in many respects, was exactly what she suspected had just happened.
Judith’s legs buckled under her and she sat down on her sofa. Her mind was frozen. She was unable to process anything.
Dimly, though, she realised there was something she had to do.
She picked up her phone again, looked up the number of Andy Bishop’s company and called it.
When the receptionist answered, Judith explained who she was and asked to be put through to Mr Bishop.
‘Unfortunately,’ the voice said on the other end of the line, ‘Mr Bishop is away on business at the moment.’
‘He is?’ Judith managed to reply. ‘When will he be back?’
‘I believe he said he was travelling to Plymouth this afternoon and staying the night. But I know he’ll be back in the office on Monday morning. Would you like to make an appointment for then?’
‘No,’ Judith said in a whisper and hung up.
As she did so, a depth charge of fear detonated inside her.
Because she now knew the truth. There weren’t going to be just three murders in Marlow, were there? There was going to be a fourth. And it was going to be her.
Chapter 38
That evening, a storm broke. Thick clouds had rolled in from the west all afternoon, and then, at teatime, the heavens opened, the rain pummelling down, the sky splitting with terrifying bolts of lightning.
Judith didn’t know what to do. She was sure she’d finally worked out who’d committed the murders, but how to prove it, that was the question. She felt so frustrated – outwitted, even – and it wasn’t a feeling she liked. Not one bit.
Although there was one thing going for her. She knew what was about to happen: there was going to be an attempt on her life that evening. Surely there was a way of using this knowledge to her advantage?
There was one way. It was dangerous. It was foolhardy, and there was every chance it would end with her lying in a pool of blood with a bullet in the centre of her forehead.
She could use herself as bait.
After all, if the killer was caught trying to kill Judith with the antique German pistol from the other murders, that would be enough to get a conviction, wouldn’t it? In which case, all Judith had to do was quietly fill her house with police officers, and the moment the killer walked in with the pistol, they could move in and make their arrest.
Although, she realised, what if the killer saw the police arrive?
In fact, the more Judith thought about it, the more she realised that the killer was very possibly already outside in the storm, spying on her house. The moment any kind of police presence arrived, the killer would slip away and wait for another day to end Judith’s life. A day when she didn’t have police protection.
No, Judith realised, she couldn’t risk involving the police. Not yet. She had to do this on her own. And only after the killer was inside her house, antique Luger in hand, could the police arrive. But how could that be achieved?
Judith was too wired to eat, but she poured herself a small glass of Scotch, went over to her card table, sharpened a pencil, and started to write down her thoughts: what she knew, what she suspected, and what she believed was about to happen.
As she finished her Scotch, her hand reached for the decanter for a refill, but she paused. One drink was enough, tonight of all nights. But she still had a craving she needed to satisfy, so she reached down to her handbag and pulled out her travel sweets. She put the tin on the table, lifted the lid and saw that the contents were now mostly icing sugar. But there were still a couple of boiled sweets left, so she popped one in her mouth and carried on with her work.
By 8 p.m. the storm had intensified, the wind now violently whipping the trees, and Judith had finalised her plans.
She’d come to the conclusion that while she couldn’t have police cars arriving at her house, she still needed an early warning system of sorts. After all, once the killer arrived, she might not have the chance to ring the police herself. Or what if the killer asked to see her phone and saw that she’d just called the police?
So Judith had rung Suzie and Becks and asked them to follow a specific set of instructions. She’d not told them about any of her theories, or about her phone call with Elliot and Andy’s secretary earlier in the afternoon. This was only partly because she wanted to make sure their lives weren’t put in danger. It was also because Judith was still smarting from what she felt was their betrayal when they’d confronted her with the newspaper article that reported Philippos’s death. So she’d told them the bare minimum that would nonetheless allow them to do what she needed them to do.
And keeping them at arm’s length also satisfied an atavistic part of Judith. If she’d learned one lesson in life, it was that you should never let people get too close. Things always worked out better if you did everything on your own.
As she sat at her card table, Judith looked up from her notes at the driving rain outside. Lightning split the sky with a fearsome crack and Judith jumped. Why now? she thought to herself. And after so many weeks of sunshine!
She had to find something to do to calm her nerves while she waited. Starting a crossword or jigsaw was out of the question, so she got out an old pack of playing cards, shuffled them, and started to play clock patience. It wasn’t a very good solitaire game, but it was the one her great aunt Betty had taught her, so it was the one she’d play now.
While she waited.
Judith sat with her back to the room, which she knew was brave to say the least, but it allowed her to keep looking out of the window at the raging storm. Inside, the only sound was the steady slap, slap, slap of the cards on the table, as Judith continued to wait. And wait.
It was just before nine o’clock when Judith saw a flash of torchlight on the other side of the river.
And then another flash.
Fear clutched at her heart.
Two flashes, a brief break, and then another two further flashes of light. Judith raised her arms above her head as though she were yawning and the flashing light stopped.
But this was it. It really was happening.
Judith looked down at the cards on the table and found that she couldn’t focus properly, the numbers and pictures were all swimming in front of her eyes. She was losing her grip, she knew, even as her limbs seemed increasingly so heavy that she feared she wouldn’t be able to move at all.
Tanika will get here, she said to herself. Ten minutes and all this will be over. Tanika will be here.
There was the sound of glass smashing somewhere in the house.
Judith’s fear sharpened.
Her killer was inside.
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner!’ Tanika shouted at Becks in the passenger seat of her police car as they bombed up the A404 towards Marlow, the sirens wailing and blue lights flashing.
‘Judith said I couldn’t!’ Becks said. ‘She told me I had to wait at the station, make sure you didn’t leave, and then, when Suzie rang me, I had to tell you the killer had arrived at her house and was about to shoot her.’
‘But I should have been there to intercept him!’
‘She said she couldn’t risk you scaring the killer off. She had to do it on her own.’
‘She can’t deal with a serial killer on her own!’ Tanika said as she spun the wheel, a wall of spray shooting up from the road as she took the roundabout to Marlow at speed. Becks held onto the passenger handle, petrified, but for once wishing the vehicle she was in could go faster. They were still minutes away fro
m Judith’s house.
As for Judith, it felt as though time had stopped for her as she sat in her chair, waiting. For seconds? Minutes? She couldn’t tell.
And then she felt a presence enter the room behind her.
There was the drip, drip, drip of water falling to the parquet. This was it.
It was time to make her play.
‘Hello, Danny,’ she said.
Judith turned in her chair and saw Danny Curtis standing across the room drenched from head to foot and wearing a grey poncho-style raincoat. He’d pulled the hood back and was looking at Judith, his eyes as wild as his hair.
‘I said, hello, Danny,’ Judith said, trying to make a connection with the man. But Danny Curtis wasn’t listening. He was breathing too heavily, staring at Judith too intently.
In his hand he was holding a Luger pistol.
Only a hundred yards away, on the other side of the Thames, Suzie stood in a panic of indecision among the dripping fronds of a weeping willow, hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm as she tried to see through the driving rain towards Judith’s house.
Earlier that evening, Judith had phoned her and said that a man was going to break into her house that night. What was more, she believed the man would very possibly make his approach along the Thames in a canoe. It was his modus operandi, she’d said, which was why she wanted Suzie hidden on the other side of the river, and a little way downstream, so she could spot him as soon as possible. Just as she wanted Becks outside Maidenhead police station, ready to run in and get Tanika or some other officer the moment Suzie phoned through and told her that the man had appeared.
When Suzie had asked for more details, or the identity of the man who’d be arriving in the canoe, Judith had refused point-blank to say any more. All she’d said was that Suzie and Becks should do as they were told or she’d go through with her plan without them. No amount of arguing could get Judith to change her mind.
Which was how Suzie ended up putting on her oilskin coat and taking her Dobermann Emma for a walk on the Marlow side of the Thames in the middle of a storm, and then hiding in a weeping willow with views back across the river towards Judith’s house.
The whole thing seemed risky as hell to Suzie’s mind, but Judith had explained that it would take the canoeist time to manoeuvre to shore, extricate himself from his boat, secure it, and then make his way up to her house. And once there, it would also take him time to work out how best to get into her house.
But Judith had been wrong.
The dim shape of a man had indeed appeared out of the rain on the river, but he’d powered along in his canoe at an incredible speed, his paddle a windmill as he churned through the water.
As soon as he’d passed Suzie’s hiding place, she’d stepped out and flashed her torch twice for Judith’s benefit. She’d then seen Judith in her downstairs sitting room stretch and yawn, which was her way of acknowledging that she’d received the message, and then Suzie had stepped back into the safety of the weeping willow to phone Becks.
But while she waited for the call to connect, Suzie had seen the canoeist paddle up to the riverbank at the end of Judith’s garden and jump out of the boat before pulling it up after himself in one easy motion. He’d then run to her house almost without breaking step.
Judith had predicted that the whole process would take the man at least ten minutes.
It had taken him less than two.
Inside the house, Danny took a step towards Judith and lifted the Luger pistol.
‘You’ve wanted Liz dead a long time,’ Judith said, trying to connect with the man in front of her. ‘Haven’t you?’
With his other hand, Danny wiped the excess water from his eyes and face. He looked entirely unhinged.
‘I wonder when the resentment started?’ Judith continued. Keep talking, she told herself. Keep talking, buy yourself time. ‘I imagine almost from the off. From the days when you were a promising rower, and you hooked up with another promising rower in Liz. But she wasn’t just promising, was she? She was the real deal. And went on to represent GB at the Olympics. Where she won a silver medal. Unlike you. Your rowing career never quite took off, did it?’
Danny’s jaw tightened.
‘And you couldn’t bear to be married to a woman who was more successful than you. You felt undermined. A failure. But then Liz did something I think you couldn’t possibly forgive. At the height of her success, another two or three Olympics ahead of her, she gave it all up. In her mid-twenties.’
Judith saw Danny frown at the memory. Yes, she thought to herself, that’s it, keep him engaged.
‘And let’s remember, you can make a lot of money if you’re a successful rower. And while it would have been a bitter pill for you to swallow, being the consort to your wife, at least she’d have been famous. But Liz wasn’t like you. She was never driven by fame. Or money. She simply wanted to be the best rower she could be, and once she’d done that and got her medal, she was happy with it. Which I think cut you to the quick. Because there you were, so graciously prepared to play second fiddle to your more talented wife, and she’d walked away from her talents. Instead, she decided she wanted to throw herself into the family business. The Marlow Rowing Centre.’
Where was Tanika? Where was Becks?
‘But the rowing centre wasn’t a good idea,’ Judith continued, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘I mean, it’s possible it made financial sense back when Liz’s dad founded it. But the climate’s tipped over since then, hasn’t it? And the centre keeps flooding. Every winter, or so it must seem to you. And now Liz makes her next mistake as far as you’re concerned. She doesn’t walk away. Even though the business is failing. Even though it has burned through all of your savings.
‘At every step of the way, I think you felt that life had let you down. First you’d failed to triumph as a rower yourself. Then you’d not been allowed to do it as the “plus one” to a famous rower. And now you weren’t even able to do it as the successful owner of a local business. The business wasn’t successful.’
As Judith had been speaking, she’d not taken her eyes off Danny, but in her peripheral vision she’d seen that his gun hand had started to waver and lower.
Judith dared to feel the first flutterings of hope. Was her plan going to work? Was she going to be able to keep Danny talking until Becks and the police arrived?
‘One minute away!’ Becks called out to Tanika as she gripped the passenger-side handle with all her strength while also checking her mobile phone’s maps app. ‘We’re going to make it!’
‘Hold on,’ Tanika said as she powered her police car through Bisham village, chicaning through the cars parked up on either side of the narrow road, and then accelerating out of Bisham and approaching Marlow Bridge at terrifying speed.
At the very last moment, she spun the steering wheel, the car screeched onto Ferry Lane, and Becks screamed as she saw a massive oak tree lying across the road, Tanika slammed on the brakes, and the car slid on the standing water, the back end starting to turn sideways before the whole thing came to a juddering stop, the rear wheel on the passenger side now hanging over the fast-flowing Thames immediately below.
The monsoon rain or a lightning strike must have felled the tree, and it was only Tanika’s quick reactions that had saved their lives.
Inside the car, neither Becks nor Tanika said anything, there was just the swish of the windscreen wipers and the drumming of the rain on the metal roof.
‘You okay?’ Tanika eventually asked.
‘I think so,’ Becks said, looking out of her passenger-side window without daring to move the weight of her body. The Thames was raging only a few feet away.
‘Okay, so this is what we’re going to do,’ Tanika said. ‘It’s your back wheel that’s over the river, so I’m your ballast, which means you need to get out of the car first. Once you’re clear, then I’ll get out. But only then.’
Becks looked in the side mirror, at the back wheel gently spinning in
thin air.
‘Don’t think about it, just do it,’ Tanika said. ‘Now get out of the car nice and calmly, and move around to the front. Do as I say. You’ll be fine.’
Becks opened her door, the wind and rain all but yanking it open for her, and she stepped out onto the inches of sodden verge that was all that stood between her and the raging river. She then dropped to her knees and slithered under the passenger door until she was back on tarmac. The moment she was safe, Tanika slipped out of the car and it rolled back a foot, falling onto its axle as the driver’s back wheel joined the other back wheel spinning freely in the air.
Tanika and Becks looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing. They wouldn’t be able to get the police car back onto the road. Not that it mattered anyway. The ancient oak tree was blocking the road completely.
There was no way of getting to Judith’s house.
Judith was struggling to contain her panic. Where were the police?
‘As for why you did this,’ she said, trying to keep the conversation going, ‘my friend Suzie put her finger on it the first time she visited this house and pointed out how valuable it must be. But my river frontage is as nothing compared to what you’ve got down at the rowing centre. The land it’s built on is worth millions. Possibly tens of millions. So why should you have to scrimp and save, and work so hard to stop the whole thing being washed away, when you could just sell it to a developer and retire on the proceeds?
‘In fact, I can’t help wondering if you didn’t marry Liz with the express plan of waiting until her father died so you could then get her to sell the land. But when she inherited, you discovered that Liz would never sell. Not even as you scrimped and saved to get by. You were stuck. Although there was one way out for you, wasn’t there? If your wife died, you’d inherit the land from her, and then you’d finally be free to sell to the highest bidder and make the millions of pounds you felt you deserved. But how to kill your wife, that was the question.’
Judith saw the moment.
Danny seemed to come out of his reverie and look at her as though for the first time.
The Marlow Murder Club Page 25