Revenge on the Rye
Page 23
‘Shared it? You mean, paid you off?’
Grey, who’d been in a reverie, stared hard at her again, then smiled with that flash of teeth. ‘Call it what you like. It was a tax on his success, I suppose. The price he paid for being a fraud.’
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place in Beth’s mind. She just hoped she’d survive long enough to tell someone else how clever she’d been.
‘So, he’d leave the money in the tree? Why there?’
‘It was somewhere we had in common. I always had to walk Mother’s blasted poodles. He was always out with Colin. And it meant we didn’t have to see each other or talk. He’d leave the money; I’d pick it up. Simple. Though the last payment went missing,’ he spat. ‘I didn’t have time to get it, could hear people moving around in the copse, I had to leg it. By the time I came back, it was gone. If he ever even put it there in the first place. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and cheat me, the bastard.’
Beth didn’t feel it was the moment to correct Grey. It was hardly cheating if the blackmail victim finally decided not to play ball. Though, in fact, Mark had carried out his side of the bargain, as usual. It was Grey who’d wrecked things by going crazy and killing his golden goose.
‘But I don’t understand what made you do it? Why did you stab him?’
Through the drizzle, she could see Grey staring at her. ‘He was waiting for me. It was an ambush. He wanted to talk. Wanted to stop. He’d had enough, he said. Didn’t want to atone any more. He wanted to come clean. But he didn’t understand. He could never stop. He had to keep going, for ever.’
Again, Beth felt Grey’s logic twist away from her. Smeaton might have wanted to stop, but it was Grey himself who’d drawn a red line under the whole business. In blood.
‘Why did you take the dog’s lead away with you?’
Again, John smiled that twisted smirk. ‘Mark loved his stupid dog. It was asleep when I stabbed him. Pathetic. Not like our poodles. They’re so intelligent. I thought about killing the dog, too, but then I thought I’d just take his lead, then he’d get run over. Serve him right.’
Beth felt her anger mount, trying its best to displace the terror running through her veins. How could he have been so mean to poor old Colin? Instantly, she vowed that if she got out of here alive, she’d take the dog on. Mark had no friends or relatives who’d stepped up anyway, but the decision made her all the more determined to survive.
She didn’t say a word, but maybe John Grey felt her resolve as he fell silent, then started coming towards her, lethal determination in every stride.
Then, crashing out of the bushes on the right-hand side, another figure burst into the clearing. Salvation! Beth’s heart leapt. ‘Thank God you’re here. Please help me, John is…’
Rebecca Grey moved out of the shadows and stood in front of her son, wiping hair and rain from her face, her sensible dog-walking coat slick with wet – and a wicked blade in her hand. Beth felt her heart plummet into her boots as she struggled to understand what she was seeing. First John, now Rebecca Grey?
‘Oh, don’t tell me what my son is,’ Rebecca Grey hissed out of the corner of her mouth, her sensible, pleasant features distorting with rain and raging emotions. ‘Don’t you think I know by now? Stupid boy, always leaving me to tidy up his mess. Thank goodness I was on the Rye that day, just to finish Mark off. I always carry this penknife. A habit from picnics with the boys, when they were young,’ she said with a reminiscent smile. It was eerily mumsy – though the knife in her hand was anything but.
‘Poor Mark. But I couldn’t have him telling everyone what John had done. And John, you fool, just look at the blade on that Stanley knife. You can’t kill someone with that, you blithering idiot…’ But words failed her, and she just shook her head, advancing purposefully on Beth instead. ‘Time to finish this off neatly, then we can all just get on with our lives. Well, most of us.’ She bared her teeth in a horrible smile, and Beth realised John Grey didn’t only share his madness with his mother. Rebecca, too, had a deeply uninfectious sense of humour.
Right. She’d given the talking thing a good old go, thought Beth frantically, but now it was definitely time to try a different tactic. She turned on her tiny heel and started to run down the track. The rain lashed in her face, the bushes seemed to reach out to grab at her, her bad arm throbbed, and the darkness, away from the open spaces of the Rye, seemed to close in on her in a ridiculously unhelpful way. After a few seconds of flight, where she virtually felt the killers’ breath on the back of her neck, Beth realised this wasn’t going to work, and broke the habit of a lifetime for the second time in recent days, plunging right off the path.
Fighting her way through the tangle of shrubs, Beth blessed the austerity cuts which had allowed all this undergrowth to sprout so magnificently. It was like trying to insert herself between the twin brushes of a car wash. She was soaked and scratched, but so far, she was alive. Grey, so much taller and bulkier, was having to bend double and was being hit in the face, satisfyingly hard, by all the branches she bent back during her headlong flight. His mother was staggering this way and that, trying to find a way between the shrubs.
All Beth could hear was her own laboured breath in her ears, and the jolting thump of her heart banging away frantically in her chest. So intent was she on getting away that she kept battling forwards for some time, even after helpful arms had grabbed her and pulled her out of the soaking bushes – and she’d emerged into a ring of pulsating blue lights.
Chapter Nineteen
A tall figure cut short a terse call on his phone and strode forward to fold Beth into a familiar navy pea-coat, warming her instantly. Then he crushed her small body in a mighty hug until her ribs hurt and her arm throbbed.
‘Thank God we managed to get that wire set up. I was just about to go in and get you out,’ said Harry into her ear.
‘About time, too! I thought I’d had it.’
‘Don’t tell me this has finally put you off all this amateur sleuth nonsense?’ said Harry, scanning her face optimistically.
‘Well, it’s definitely put me off something,’ said Beth, wrinkling her brow under her wet fringe.
‘What’s that?’ Harry asked, bending to place a series of delectable small kisses along her jawline, while the other officers were distracted with cuffing and cautioning John Grey. He’d been dragged from the trees, sopping wet and swearing, along with his mother, whose middle-class, middle-aged features had morphed into an uncanny representation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
‘Who’d have thought that Wyatt’s would turn out a murderer-cum-blackmailer? And send his mother completely mad into the bargain? Are you sure we’re doing the right thing, trying to get Ben in there?’
Harry York smiled, and bent to kiss Beth again.
Chapter Twenty
Beth and Katie stared at each other over their cappuccinos. It was all quiet in Jane’s at the magical hour of 11.15am, the moment when the toddlers, mummies, and au pairs of SE21 were otherwise engaged.
‘But I don’t understand, why didn’t you ring me and let me in on it all?’ Katie’s eyes were wide with betrayal.
‘Are you crazy? You’re not telling me you’d actually have enjoyed being out on the Rye in the middle of the night, with not one but two homicidal murderers trying to stab you? Plus, it was raining really hard, too. Look at my hair, it’s a disaster.’
‘Well, when you put it like that… But it’s the principle of the thing,’ said Katie doggedly, eyeing Beth’s ponytail, which looked much the same as usual. ‘Anyway, you were all wired up, weren’t you? All Harry and his team had to do was hoick you out if it turned nasty.’
‘Believe me, it did turn very nasty. And Harry was “just considering his options with Gold Commander” when I decided to make a run for it. If I’d waited for him to step in, I’d be in small bits on the Rye right now. Honestly, you have to get through so much red tape with the Met, it’s surprising anyone gets out of a covert operation a
live,’ said Beth crossly.
Katie patted Beth’s arm, and Beth winced and put it down by her side. She’d been lucky, she knew that, but it looked as though she was going to have another battle scar to remember this business by.
‘It could have been even worse, though,’ said Beth, with a reminiscent shiver. ‘John said he was hoping Colin would get run over.’
‘That man was evil,’ Katie tutted, glancing towards the doors. Teddy was tied up outside in an experiment both women suspected was not going to last that long, but the old Labrador was placidly waiting for Beth, the new centre of his world, at home. ‘What’s going to happen with Colin?’
Beth sighed. ‘Well, there isn’t anyone to take him. Mark Smeaton’s parents are long gone, and none of his friends have begged to have him. I guess there’s nothing for it.’ The words sounded resigned, even resentful, but Beth’s smile said it all. She couldn’t bear to part with Colin now.
‘But what about work?’ Katie asked.
‘I’ve spoken to Janice, and we’ve come to an arrangement. Colin will be allowed in, but only for half days.’
‘But you only ever work half days anyway – if that,’ Katie said.
‘Shh! Anyway, all that’s going to change. I’m going to really get down to it this term,’ said Beth, her grey eyes serious.
‘Right,’ said Katie, smiling. ‘Is that okay with that awful bloke, the Bursar?’
‘Seems to be. Well, what can he say? Dr Grover’s word is law – and Janice has very kindly told him what to say.’
‘What I don’t understand is how you knew it was John Grey, in the end? Even though it was actually his mum, if you see what I mean,’ Katie wrinkled her brow.
‘It was partly what Josh told me about the three boys. John was always the whiny one, hanging onto the other two, but also getting them into trouble accidentally-on-purpose. He seemed to be bitterly jealous. And imagine how much worse that must have got when Mark made such a success of things, and John was still living at home, making crappy furniture.’
‘But still,’ said Katie. ‘It’s a long way from thinking he might be a bit dodgy, to being sure that he was a killer.’
‘Well, meeting Zoe’s sister Magenta while I was out walking Colin was a breakthrough. Because I didn’t know it, but she’d worked for both Kuragin and his awful friend, Benson, as an unpaid intern.’
‘Poor girl,’ said Katie.
‘Yes, it’s put her off the art world for life; she’s becoming a lawyer now. But it turned out, while we were talking, that she’d seen both Kuragin and Benson on the day Mark Smeaton died. Neither of them would have had time to kill him and get back to their central London galleries in order to see her and give her a hard time about this and that. So, you see, I was able to make the leap to John Grey. It was either him – or some psychopathic stranger.’
‘Or an insane mother.’
‘Yes,’ said Beth, and both women fell silent. Beth had certainly felt the odd murderous rage boiling up when her own son was upset by other kids at school. How far would she go to assuage the wrongs done him? Not as far as Rebecca Grey, obviously. Well, she certainly hoped not.
‘Does it make you think twice about Wyatt’s?’ Beth asked her friend.
‘No, of course not. Why?’
‘Well, it just got me wondering. I mean, Josh has turned out the way he has… then there’s John Grey. And his mother was probably sane when he was in Year 7.’
‘Josh is a really successful war photographer, Beth. Mark Smeaton was a global phenomenon, though it was under a false name. And John Grey, well, he might have turned out even worse at another school,’ said Katie, with her usual sunny smile.
Nevertheless, Beth was thoughtful as she made her way home. She turned her key in the lock to find not only Magpie lying down in the hall for tummy tickles, but also Colin, sitting bolt upright, with something unfamiliar in his mouth. For a second, she wondered if it was his first mouse. Magpie was definitely leading him astray. He’d be demanding top-notch dog food next.
But wait a minute, that wasn’t a sorry little woodland creature at all. It was even worse than that. She dashed forward and dragged something out of his jaws. There, slightly splattered with doggy drool, was a battered white envelope with a rather smeared Wyatt’s postmark in the left-hand corner. The fateful letter, at last.
Her heart was beating almost as fast as it had that night on the Rye, as she shut the door to her little house.
THE END
From the same series:
1. Death in Dulwich
2. The Girl in the Gallery
3. Calamity in Camberwell
4. Homicide in Herne Hill
5. Revenge on the Rye
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From the same series:
1. Death in Dulwich
2. The Girl in the Gallery
3. Calamity in Camberwell
4. Homicide in Herne Hill
5. Revenge on the Rye