Hackett grunted, distracted. He was poring over the article on Helen Wilkinson. ‘This picture,’ he said. ‘Says here Molyneux took it.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve seen it somewhere else . . .’
‘Well, where?’ Nelson, always on a short fuse, was experiencing the stirrings of irritation.
Hackett’s eyes darted right and left, and he seemed to be sifting through his memories like they were on a carousel. Suddenly he stopped. ‘Bloody hell . . .’ he murmured.
Nelson felt his eyes begin to bug with suppressed tension and readied himself to start yelling, but Hackett spoke just in time:
‘There was a similar photo — not the same — but very like.’ He peered at the newspaper under the car’s interior light. ‘A different angle, I think. Softer focus. Not so much of the house showing in the background.’
‘Where, for God’s sake?’ Nelson exploded.
‘It was in Ruth Marks’s flat.’
Nelson frowned, running it through in his mind. Cluttered coffee table, steel shelves, coffee brewing to mask the smell of cannabis. Microscope on the table in the turret, mantelshelf a jumble of dusty postcards, wooden monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Behind them a photograph of Helen Wilkinson.
He shook his head, doubtful. ‘Could be a copy from the Recorder photo. She could’ve ordered one.’
‘Different picture. I’d swear to it. I think our Dr Marks likes to take mementoes. And if we can prove she got it from Molyneux’s flat . . .’
* * *
‘You know what it feels like to have that kind of power over someone else, Helen? The power to grant life or take it? It’s God-like.’ She closed her eyes and relived the moment:
She had slipped downstairs in Helen’s dressing gown, to fetch Ed a drink, and had returned to the bedroom with a tall glass of icy beer in one hand and the knife in the other.
‘What have you got behind your back?’
‘A surprise. Do you want it?’
‘That depends. Will I like it?’
‘You may not like it, but it’s just what you need. And I promise you, I’ll be quick.’
‘And I got away with it. I watched the police chasing in little circles — they even asked my advice! I tell you, Helen, it feels like I’ve fallen from a great height without so much as a bruise.’
‘Was it revenge? Were you repaying the patronizing and the personal humiliations of a lifetime by killing the greatest chauvinist of all?’
Ruth laughed ‘Spare me the psychobabble! I could have walked away — only I felt the need to help you out of the hole you’d dug for yourself.’
‘And you wanted to see if you could do it.’
Ruth shrugged, a secret smile, a barely visible raising of her eyebrows.
‘They were your keys, weren’t they?’ Helen said. ‘How else could Ellis have got into the house?’
‘Interesting choice wasn’t it — the mouse, I mean. “The mouse that roared”, and all that. I gave him his chance to make his point to you — he bottled out of that, too.’
‘He didn’t bottle out, Ruth, he killed himself.’ Helen was shouting. ‘Don’t you care? Doesn’t it matter at all to you?’
Ruth sighed. ‘It’s not my job to care about every inadequate who takes on more than he can handle. I warned him he was pissing in the wind with his ludicrous research into Gaia. That’s more than Mallory did for him.’ She shot Helen a vicious look. ‘Or you, for that matter. You were wallowing so deep in self-pity over the miscarriage, it’s a wonder you didn’t drown in it.’
Helen nodded. ‘I was too engrossed in my own misery to see Ellis’s; but what’s your excuse?’
‘Marriage/miscarriage. I wonder if poets ever use it as a rhyme?’
Ruth snapped to, sitting up and rapping the table with her knuckles. ‘I don’t need an excuse. I’m not sorry, or ashamed, of anything.’
‘So is that really all this was?’ Helen asked. ‘An interesting experiment?’
‘It was certainly that.’
‘And what did I do that made you turn against me?’
Ruth smiled, but refused to answer.
‘Is it Mick? Are you jealous of him?’
‘Jealous? You replaced an emotional cripple with a physical cripple,’ Ruth said. ‘I might feel nauseated, but jealous?’ She puffed air between her lips.
‘You know they’ll find you,’ Helen said. ‘The police aren’t stupid, Ruth.’
‘Perhaps, but they don’t have any evidence. Here, look at this.’ Ruth dipped into her jeans pocket and took out two fifty pence coins. She slapped them onto the table and looked up at Helen, triumphant. ‘I’ve been walking around with those in my pocket ever since it happened.’
Helen glanced at the coins. ‘You’ll have to explain.’
Ruth picked up one coin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, the other in her left. She closed her eyes and carefully placed a coin on each eyelid. ‘You did say his eyes had to be closed.’
Helen recoiled. ‘Christ, Ruth, you’re sick!’
Ruth tipped forward, catching the coins in the palm of her hand.
‘My only sickness was allowing your pitiful defencelessness to affect me, letting myself be taken in by you.’
‘I wasn’t trying to fool anyone, Ruth. I was being what I am: human. I’m sorry if you thought my vulnerability was all of me. That was how I felt at the time. I was being honest with you.’
‘Well, then, you’re best off without Ed, and I did the right thing.’
‘Don’t you regret the photographer? And John Ellis?’ Helen asked, desperate to find some remnant of humanity in her old friend.
‘Ellis would’ve been turned in by Ed, if he’d lived. Or he’d’ve pointed the great fat finger of accusation at himself with his flimsy data and his botched results. No. I don’t feel sorry for him — I did him a favour.’
‘And the photographer — what about him?’
‘I hadn’t reckoned on the photographer. I don’t even know him. Not really. Bit of a flirt, a ladies’ man, no doubt, but that’s hardly a capital offence. The problem is, when you act on someone else’s behalf, there are complications. You have to look out for more than just yourself, and when you’re looking out for someone else, sometimes things get by you. Like a photographer with a camera pointed right at you.’
Helen felt suddenly cold. ‘What did he see?’
‘Me at the window, I’d just put the knife in the bedside cabinet. Of course, he didn’t have a shot of that, but he had me, on camera, where I wasn’t supposed to be, at about the time a rather unpleasant package had been left in your fridge. If those pictures had been printed, you would have guessed.’
‘I guessed anyway.’
Ruth smiled. ‘Yes, you did — good for you. But the problem was, with the photographic evidence, the police might have guessed, too.’
‘So you tried to kill him.’
‘Molyneux took a chance. People in his profession measure risks and weigh them against the potential glory. If he’d pulled it off and got that crisp, clear picture of me, then I’d be the one in deep shit, and he’d be in clover.’
* * *
‘It must’ve been taken at the same time as this one,’ Hackett said. They were inside Ruth Marks’s flat. Hackett held up the newspaper next to the photograph on the mantelshelf.
‘It certainly looks like it,’ Nelson agreed, peering at it. He glanced over his shoulder, giving the waiting SOCO the signal to get started.
‘Is it enough?’ Hackett asked.
‘The Recorder haven’t had any requests for that particular photograph from the public,’ Nelson said. ‘Where else would she get it, but from Molyneux’s flat?’
‘If we had the knife—’
‘We’ll search for it here, but I can’t see her keeping it. She’d have chucked it by now, wouldn’t she?’
Hackett shrugged. ‘What about the forensic evidence from the bed? Could we do a match on the pubic
hairs?’ Hackett addressed this question to the SOCO who had just finished photographing the picture of Helen in situ, and was now lifting it with great care, into a flat cardboard box.
‘If you get us something to match them with,’ the SOCO said.
‘That’s just what we’re about to do,’ Nelson said, grinning.
* * *
‘You’re already up to your neck,’ Helen said. ‘I know everything. I even know why, God help me.’
‘You’re my friend,’ Ruth said, with a smile. ‘Friends look out for each other.’
The front doorbell rang and Ruth twitched. ‘Hackett, with his warrant to search. What are they going to make of all this?’ she asked, indicating the knife and the coins lying on the table.
Helen stared hard at her. ‘My prints are on the knife. I expect yours aren’t. I don’t suppose the coins can be traced back to you, or to Edward’s body—’ Helen stopped.
Perhaps she had seen the shock in Ruth’s face: she was thinking of the touching picture of Helen, very like the House of Death photograph in the paper, but in this image, by some trick Molyneux had harnessed compassion. There was a softness in the shadows, a kindness in the light — it seemed to understand Helen’s sadness. It must have affected the photographer, too, for he had kept it, tacked up on his wall.
‘I had to have it,’ she with a little groan, closing her eyes against the dazzling stupidity of her actions.
‘Have what?’ Helen said.
‘Another memento, another trophy in the game. However—’ Ruth added, brightening, ignoring Helen’s confusion, ‘When you analyse it, what exactly have the police got? A knife with Edward’s blood and your fingerprints on it. A photographer with a fractured skull. His word would add weight to the argument if (if! Makes me breathless just thinking about it) he recovers. His fingerprints and mine on the portrait of you. Only Dermot knows I left him for dead. “Where there’s life there’s hope,” my mother used to say.’ She chuckled. ‘Where there’s life there’s uncertainty, more like.’
‘I know,’ Helen said again, quietly. The hall echoed with the continuous ringing of the bell. ‘I know you hit that poor man over the head and left him for dead.’
‘Self-preservation, Helen.’
‘Perhaps I would have protected you if it was only Edward to consider in the case,’ Helen said. ‘But there is Ellis’s suicide. And Molyneux really didn’t deserve this.’
‘Life and death. It happens to us all,’ Ruth said. ‘I just decided when, and to whose advantage, that’s all.’
Helen stared into Ruth’s eyes. ‘I wonder if I ever really knew you,’ she murmured.
Ruth stared back, wondering how she could have so misjudged the situation. The doorbell kept up its persistent ringing — an alarm, a warning of imminent disaster. Then footsteps in the passage to the side of the house. Between them, a knife, two coins and a chasm of difference.
Ruth snatched up the knife, gripping it by the handle through the plastic bag.
Helen stood. Her chair clattered as it fell and the footsteps, as if in sympathy, rattled like stones in the side passage of the house.
Helen backed into the hallway. ‘Ruth—’
‘You’ve been acting strangely,’ Ruth said. ‘You never really got over the miscarriage. But I couldn’t believe it when you pulled the knife on me. I almost fainted with fright.’
She watched from the kitchen until Helen reached to the front door. It was almost funny seeing her to fumble ineffectively with the latch. ‘It’s on the mortise,’ she said as Helen became frantic.
Helen turned, panting, like a trapped animal trying to find some route of escape.
‘Of course, I tried to get out,’ Ruth said. ‘But you’d locked the doors. I was terrified. You came at me and I tried to grab the knife.’ Ruth grasped the blade of the knife, still in the bag, with her left hand and then pulled back with her right. She shuddered slightly but did not take her eyes from Helen.
Helen eyes widened in horror, as fresh blood mingled with the old — Ruth’s with Edward’s — on the blade. Ruth listened to the blood drip with the regular ticking sound of a clock onto the faded strip of carpet in the hall. She felt suddenly faint and put her right hand against the wall to steady herself. The knife blade left a smear on the wall.
A hammering began at the back door. Ruth turned slightly, distracted by the noise, and by the pain in her left hand, turning back just in time to see Helen pluck a walking stick from the stand next to the front door. She swung, but Ruth ducked and it gouged a hole in the plaster of the wall. Helen ran to the stairs. She managed a few steps, but Ruth seized her ankle and dragged her back, slashing with the knife. The bag, now tattered, flapped like torn skin around the blade, and the handle, slick with blood, slipped in her hand. She tightened her grip and slashed again. It caught Helen’s a grazing blow on the leg. Helen screamed, kicking out hard.
A crash of glass, followed by urgent shouts.
Hackett, Ruth thought. The knife fell from her hand and she found herself inexplicably face-down on the stairs. That’s not good.
She tried to reach for the knife. Her fingers made small movements, but she couldn’t seem to give them purpose. Helen was getting away. Get up!
No good. No strength . . .
She heard Helen whisper, Helen ‘My God—’
A heavy footfall. Yells of, ‘Police! Stay where you are!’ Hackett’s voice. He’d got in through the kitchen window.
Ruth coughed, turning on her back to greet the policeman, wanting to say something devastating. But she but couldn’t make a sound.
She tried to raise her hands to her neck, and heard Helen say, ‘No, no, don’t—’
Sergeant Hackett was staring down at her with a look of almost comical horror on his face and Ruth knew, instantly, that when Helen lashed out, the knife blade must have slashed her throat.
A second later, Helen was by her side, cradling her head, trying to hold it steady. ‘Call for an ambulance,’ Helen shouted. ‘And fetch some towels.’
Attagirl, Ruth thought, approving the tone of command in Helen’s voice.
‘The knife has gone deep,’ she heard Helen say, as if talking to a child. ‘So you need to keep quite still. Do you understand me? It’s lodged between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Stay very, very still, Ruth.’
She saw tears in Helen’s eyes.
Doesn’t she know I won’t go to prison?
As a neurobiologist, Ruth knew that the nerves located at C4 and C5 controlled the vocal cords. How about that? Helen getting the final word, for once. The same bundle of nerves also controlled breathing. Ruth looked into Helen’s blue eyes, brimming with compassion, and smiled. Then with every inch of strength she had left, she gave a sudden convulsive movement which severed her spinal cord.
Helen screamed.
Ruth felt the flare of heat on her face once more: Spring sunshine melting the dusty tarmac of the pot-holed road near her childhood home. She had made the beetle notice — she must have — she could hear its screams — not in her imagination — these were real, high-pitched screams, like a woman’s.
Simultaneously, she felt the blade of the knife slip sideways, and the screaming stopped. Everything stopped. And there was only silence.
THE END
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Jeff Parker, of Liverpool University, who sacrificed a sizeable chunk of his busy schedule to discuss Behavioural Ecology research methods with me, and who let me look around the Population Biology Research Group Lab and talk to his postgraduate researchers. For their insight into research techniques, I am grateful.
Any malpractice implied in the story is my own invention, and any errors of scientific procedure, I claim wholly for myself.
ALSO BY MARGARET MURPHY
CLARA PASCAL SERIES
Book 1: DARKNESS FALLS
Book 2: WEAVING SHADOWS
DETECTIVE JEFF RICKMAN SERIES
Book 1: SEE HER B
URN
Book 2: SEE HER DIE
ROWAN & PALMER
Book 1: BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN
STANDALONE
DEAR MUM
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