Their Fatal Secrets

by JANICE FROST

  Chapter Thirteen

  “DS Merry, I’d like you to accompany me to Jeffers.” Ava stared at Neal, her mouth open. Did she think he was asking her on a date? He looked at her. “The nightclub where Bryony claims to have seen Seth mistreating a girl on the pavement outside?”

  “I know where you mean, sir. Sorry, I was just thinking about something Ollie said to me this morning.”

  Relieved, Neal asked her to meet him outside in ten minutes. Ava probably needed an injection of caffeine.

  “We walking?” Ava joined him outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. The nightclub was about five minutes’ walk away. It would take much longer in the car. Neal nodded and waited while she rummaged in her bag for a pair of oversized sunglasses. They added a touch of film star glamour to her already perfect looks. They walked on in silence. Neal glanced at her profile, for the first time noticing the freckles dappled across her forehead. Maybe it was the sun. He realised it had been mostly grey or dark since they began working together less than a year ago. He thought again of that moment in the car after her birthday drink, and his pulse quickened.

  “So, Maggie phoned me last night,” Ava said.

  “Oh?” The friendship between Ava and his sister sometimes made Neal anxious that work might be coming too close to his private life.

  “She seems quite smitten with your friend, Jock.”

  Neal smiled. “Jock’s been in love with my sister for as long as I can remember.” To tell the truth, he was hoping Maggie might have confided to Ava how she felt about his friend.

  “Well, it looks like his love isn’t going to remain unrequited for much longer.”

  “Did Maggie tell you she had feelings for him?” Neal looked at her.

  “Hasn’t she told you?”

  ”Not in so many words, but it’s quite likely I’ve missed some signals.” They stopped to cross the road.

  “Yes, that wouldn’t surprise me.” Ava’s face was turned towards the oncoming traffic.

  “So I can tell Jock he has a chance?”

  Ava looked up. “We’re here.”

  The bar was above a pizza restaurant. After a cursory glance at their ID, the bouncer waved them up a narrow flight of stairs.

  Ava smiled at Neal. “Yes, Jock has a chance.”

  Neal concentrated on his feet. The walls were painted matt black and it was hard to see. A man was waiting at the top.

  “DI Neal? DS Merry? I’m Mackenzie Thorner, commonly known as Mac. I’m the manager. Well, owner actually. One of them. Would you like to come upstairs to my office?” They followed him across an L-shaped room that seemed surprisingly small to Neal. There was a bar, a dance floor the size of a postage stamp, a few round tables and a banquette that ran along the length of one wall. A mike and some karaoke equipment stood roughly halfway along the longer wall. Neal glanced at it, and remembered Ava’s sexy performance at her birthday celebration.

  Mac showed them into a small room with windows overlooking the street. He had mutton chop whiskers and a bleached white smile which was currently flashing at Ava.

  She returned the smile. “Nice place you have here.”

  “I bought it with my brother. He’s in musicals. That’s him as Joseph up there, see?” He pointed to a large, framed poster above his desk. It showed a young man who looked like Mac’s twin dressed in a multi-coloured coat. “He’s in a show right now down in London. You might have heard of him? Lex Thorner? It’s Alex really. Lex is his stage name. We always have a full house when he does a gig here. His fans come from all over.” Neal thought Lex’s fans must hardly be legion if they could be accommodated in a bar this size.

  He smiled politely. “Mr Mackenzie, we’re here in connection with an investigation into the death of a woman called Leanne Jackson.”

  “Terrible business,” Mac said. “But how can I help?”

  Neal explained that they were looking for Seth Conway.

  Ava showed him the photograph forwarded by the Yeardsley Trust. “Have you seen him in the club?” Mac stared at the picture and nodded.

  “How about these young women?” Ava showed Mac images of Corinna Masters and Ruby Kennedy. “No, sorry. They don’t look familiar.”

  “Can you tell us anything about Seth Conway?” Neal asked.

  “He wasn’t a regular, but there was an incident involving him. A young woman picked a fight with him one night. We had to throw her out.”

  “Any idea what it was all about?”

  Mac shook his head. “No idea. She’d never been here before, so I can’t tell you who she was either.”

  “Does your bar have CCTV, Mac?” Ava asked.

  “Yeah. My brother-in-law installed it. But we wipe the tapes after seven days. You could always try YouTube.”

  Neal nodded, recalling all the events he’d attended in the past few years where people filmed rather than watched the real thing. He doubted it would yield great results. The quality of amateur films shot on mobile phones was often execrable. He could never understand why people spent an entire event filming something they were there to experience live.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Ava said.

  “I could give you a list of Lex’s fans that regularly tweet and put out blog posts on him, if it would help. They were all filming and blogging that night. You could check their social media sites.”

  “That would be great, thanks, Mac,” Ava said.

  They turned to leave. On their way out, Mac stamped a couple of leaflets advertising his brother’s next gig at the bar. “Show these to Jake on the door and say Mac said to let you in.” He rummaged in a tray on his desk. “Here, take these too.” He handed them both a slip entitling them to a free drink.

  “Er, sorry, we’re not allowed, but thanks anyway.” Neal gave Mac his contact details so that he could send on the list of bloggers. They returned, with relief, to the sunshine.

  “Guess I’ll be spending hours watching YouTube videos of Lex Mackenzie.” Ava sounded less than enthusiastic.

  “First we’re going to speak with Ruby Kennedy’s parents,” Neal said.

  Neal and Ava walked back to the station.

  * * *

  Within the hour they were drawing up outside a mock-Tudor style family home on an estate backing onto Silverbirch Park. This was a large country park in the southwest of the city with acres of woodland and a large lake. It had once been owned by a local businessman who had built his family home there, called Silverbirch Hall. During the Second World War, the hall had served as an officers’ mess, and the land had been used for military training. By the time the land was purchased by the city in the 1950s, the hall had fallen into disrepair. It had been demolished rather than restored, and the grounds opened to the public. In a matter of years it had an adventure playground, a visitor centre and a café.

  A long strip of silver birch trees shielded the Kennedys’ estate from the park’s boundary walls. At this time of year the woodland fringing the park was ribboned with rhododendrons, their deep magenta blooms a striking contrast to the pale trunks of the slender birch trees.

  Ava looked at her phone. “It’s four thirty. We’re twenty minutes early.”

  “They’re in. I saw someone at an upstairs window,” said Neal. The house was set back from the street, with similar houses on either side of it. “Come on,” Neal said, impatient to get the interview over with. Ruby Kennedy’s parents had already been informed of their daughter’s death, but their grief would still be raw. Neal wasn’t looking forward to confronting it.

  The Kennedys had not seen their daughter for some time prior to her death. Ruby had a history of running away from home. Ava had contacted Ruby’s social worker and heard a familiar tale of early trauma — in Ruby’s case, it was a sexual assault when she was fourteen, committed by a group of boys in the park that lay just an arm’s reach from her home. From being a difficult child she had spiralled into an unmanageable teenager with emotional and behavioural issues.

  The woman who ope
ned the door to them appeared to be in her late forties or early fifties. She was slight, dressed in cargo shorts and a pretty floral top. Her shoulder-length hair was streaked with blonde highlights — or lowlights, Neal was never sure which was which, though Maggie had once explained it to him. Her legs were bare, lightly tanned, and muscular. She looked as though she went to the gym two or three times a week and watched what she ate. Neal knew that she had a good job in a bank, and her husband was a maths teacher. The Kennedys had two other children besides Ruby. A surface-perfect family, with a dark and tragic underside.

  Neal introduced himself and Ava, and Martha Kennedy led them through a living room furnished in oak, past a sumptuous cream soft leather sofa, into a sunlit conservatory overlooking a long, well-kept lawn. A cluster of silver birches fringed the fence at the bottom of the garden, one of them standing just inside the boundary. A wooden seat had been placed under the tree, and a man sat there, filling a bird-feeder with nuts. Martha Kennedy tapped on the conservatory window, and the man stood up and came in to join them. Douglas Kennedy was about a foot taller than his wife and at least ten years older. He looked careworn. Unlike his fashionably dressed wife, he reminded Neal of the male leads in the Bergman films of the fifties. They all had wavy hair, geeky glasses and wore oversized Scandinavian jumpers, and were invariably intellectual and introspective.

  His wife introduced them. Douglas pushed his glasses further up his long nose and solemnly shook their hands. They were polite people, Neal guessed, but good manners couldn’t mask the sadness that came off them in waves. No drinks were offered. They sat down in the bright conservatory — too bright, it seemed, for the dark conversation at hand.

  Before Neal could begin, Martha Kennedy blurted out, “Please find who did this to our daughter. We want justice for her now, that’s all.” Her husband sat in stony silence, pulling at his fingers. Neal got the impression that he had learned to expect disappointment.

  Before Neal could say anything, Ava, who was often given to speaking out of turn, said, “We will, Mrs Kennedy.”

  For once Neal didn’t feel irritated with her for making such an assurance.

  “Perhaps, if it’s not too difficult, you could tell us something about Ruby’s life,” he said, gently. “Please take your time and stop if you feel distressed.”

  Martha waved her arms in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I believe Ruby went to stay with foster parents in Nottingham because her social worker felt she was at risk here in Stromford?” Neal looked at the husband.

  Douglas Kennedy sighed. “Ruby’s problems started a lot longer ago than that. We should probably start further back.” Beside him, his wife nodded, her eyes on the floor. “Love?” Douglas prompted.

  The word seemed to galvanise Martha. Her whole demeanour went from passive, grief-stricken spouse to fierce, protective mother, someone who was more than capable of speaking for herself. This, Neal suspected, was the real Martha Kennedy. He had seen it all too often, especially with women of a certain age for whom confidence and assertiveness had been earned rather than given as a birth-right.

  “We used to think we were just really bad at the business of parenting,” Martha began. “Ruby was our eldest. No one knows what to expect when they have a child, but Ruby just seemed to turn everything we thought we knew on its head. She was clever, quick,” Martha paused, then smiled. “Lit from within I used to say, because she seemed so full of joy and life. But she was . . . demanding. Exhausting. Even as a toddler her behaviour could be challenging. She used to hit the other kids at her play group for no apparent reason. At primary school she was disruptive in class. Douglas and I were always being called in to speak to the head teacher. Friends told us it was because she was bright, and that difficult children often grow into well-behaved, studious teenagers.” Martha gave a sort of laugh. “If only. By the time she left primary school, she’d been diagnosed with ADHD—”

  Douglas interrupted. “Our daughter’s life might have panned out differently if it hadn’t been for. . .” Douglas couldn’t say it. It was left to Martha to utter the detestable word.

  “The rape.” Her voice was steady. She had probably talked about her daughter’s experience to friends, relatives, counsellors. Unlike her husband, Neal suspected, who sat, ramrod straight on the rattan sofa, anger radiating from every cell in his body. Despite the warmth of the conservatory, Douglas Kennedy looked like he’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen.

  Martha paid no attention to her husband’s discomfort. “No doubt you already know about that,” she said. Neal gave a slight nod. “She was walking through the park on her way home from a friend’s house at about half six in the evening. It was dark. She’d been warned not to take that shortcut in the winter, but Ruby never seemed to have much sense of danger. She was thirteen at the time.

  She was crossing the adventure playground when three boys from her school stopped in front of her, blocking her way. The boys were older, two of them nineteen and the other twenty. They chatted with her, gave her cigarettes and cans of cider. She thought they were just being friendly, and she enjoyed the attention. It didn’t take long for her to get drunk — she’d never had alcohol before. They pushed her on the swing. Then they took turns having sex with her.”

  PJ had spoken with Ruby’s social worker, who had told her that Ruby hadn’t really understood the gravity of what had happened to her. She had identified the boys after her distraught parents alerted the police, but had been unable to grasp that they had done anything all that wrong. Though charges had been brought against the boys, they had been dropped because Ruby would not speak out against them.

  “That’s when our lives began to unravel,” Martha said, her voice trembling now. “Ruby’s behaviour spiralled out of control. She was hardly ever at school. One evening a girl from her class turned up on our doorstep and asked if we knew Ruby was sneaking out late at night and hanging round with a group of older boys. We didn’t really believe this tale until Doug waited outside the house one night and saw her climb out of her bedroom window onto the roof of the porch, and jump to the ground. He followed her to the park where he saw her flirting with some boys and knocking back booze. He waited until she climbed into the back seat of a car with two of the lads before he intervened. He dragged her kicking and screaming from the car and as soon as he got her home, she tried to go out again. We had to physically restrain her from leaving the house.” Martha choked up and turned aside.

  “Would you like to take a break?” Neal asked. “I appreciate this must be very traumatic for you.”

  “If you point me in the direction of the kitchen, I could make some tea — or coffee,” Ava offered. Martha nodded.

  “Please excuse me for a few minutes,” Martha said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll show you where everything is.” Douglas stood up and Ava followed him out. Neal went to the window and watched a squirrel trying to steal nuts from the bird-feeder. He stepped outside for some fresh air, startling the squirrel.

  At times like these, Neal felt like a voyeur, an intruder in the lives of grieving families. He had to do it, of course, it was part of the job, but he would never get used to it. Was it really that crucial to the case to hear these distraught parents recount their story? He had learned no new facts.

  Voices wafted through the open kitchen window. He heard the throaty sound of Ava’s infectious laughter. Well, Douglas Kennedy had enough darkness in his life. Let him bask in Ava’s light for a while. The sound of running water indicated that Martha was washing away her tears. He marvelled at the couple’s ability to carry on in the face of such tragedy. The Kennedys’ marriage must have been tested to breaking point by worry over their daughter. Had they ever wished her out of their lives for good? They didn’t strike him as the sort of people who would abandon their responsibilities, or renounce their unconditional love when things got tough.

  Martha retuned first. She joined Neal in the garden and he told her about the squirrel
.

  Martha smiled. “The nuts are for him too, but he’s greedy. We leave titbits for him on the bird table but he eats them and then wants the birds’ food too.”

  From the kitchen came the sound of Ava’s laughter again. This time, Neal could hear Douglas joining in.

  Martha said quietly, “I’m grateful to your sergeant. I don’t often hear Doug laughing these days.” She looked at Neal. “Do you have children?”

  “One. A son. He’s ten, nearly eleven,” Neal replied, embarrassed at the pride in his voice.

  “We have twin boys as well as Ruby. It hasn’t been easy for them, especially when they were younger and Ruby was kicking off all the time. She could be quite aggressive at times, but never towards them. They adored her.”

  Neal found himself echoing Ava’s assurance. “We will get justice for you and Ruby, Mrs Kennedy.”

  Ava waved at them from the conservatory. Douglas was behind her, carrying a tea tray. “Shall we go back in?” Martha led the way.

  Once inside, Douglas passed Neal a milk jug. “DS Merry has been telling me about her prowess in the martial arts. Used to do a bit of karate and judo myself. I taught Ruby and the boys a few moves. I’m afraid I’m no match for your sergeant though.”

  Neal smiled. “Tell me how Ruby ended up in care.” He felt like the greedy squirrel, wanting more than its due.

  Martha sighed. “Ruby became known to social services at the time of the rape. We’d hoped they’d be some real help to her, but that was a laugh. Do you have any idea of the shambolic state of mental health services available to vulnerable young people?”

  Child and adolescent mental health services — CAMHS — were in a state of crisis. There were abundant stories in the news about teenage suicides that occurred because young people had to wait too long for professional help, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. A whole generation of young people with many different kinds of mental health issues was being denied access to any kind of care.