Michael tried to brace himself for whatever new horror Esme was about to impart to him. “And what was that?”
“That the girl who was in part to blame for Amy’s drowning, and who everyone thought had gone away for good, has turned up.”
“She has?” asked Michael. “I realize that I didn’t ask what happened to her after she left wherever it was she went to. That must have been years ago.”
“Rose had heard that she had changed her name and probably left the country to start a new life where nobody knew her history. Everyone assumed that we would never hear from her again, but then a few weeks ago she just arrived unexpectedly at Greenacres.”
“She did?” Michael had thought he was past the stage where he could be amazed. “How come? How did she track Rose down?”
“She didn’t. When she came to Greenacres she didn’t know who Rose was. She came to visit her. With you. Her original name as a child was Elizabeth, but she changed it when she left child custody. The girl who lived next door to you as a child, and was there on the day your baby sister died, is your girlfriend, Alison.”
EIGHTEEN
Less than half a mile away, on a bench close to Horse Guards Parade, Alison sat and contemplated the faded and blurred photograph she had picked out of Michael’s jacket pocket on the previous afternoon. She had been unable to sleep even a moment since her discovery, and every minute of every hour since then had been spent in a state of the most excruciating torment. Now she felt completely exhausted by the stress of it all.
She reflected upon all of the effort she had gone to after leaving the children’s home at age eighteen to put her old life behind her and to begin completely afresh. She had been determined for many years to explore the possibility of leaving Britain altogether, to try to begin a new life in another country. She shared her hopes with the authorities, and it was agreed that her best chance of retaining anonymity was for her to emigrate. She was so excited and relieved when an agreement was reached with the Australian authorities that she could go there, and as part of the process she had changed her name from Elizabeth to Alison and taken a new surname.
Over the years there were a regular stream of inquiries from the press and media about the likely timing of Elizabeth’s return back into society, and so the Home Office agreed that no announcement should be made and that she should be assisted to go more or less directly from the institution to the airport.
During her years working as a tour guide in Sydney, she began to feel for the first time that there was a possibility that she might put some distance, in time and space, from all the dreadful memories which had been the background to her life so far. No one there had heard of the appalling tragedy which happened a decade earlier, and she was able to invent a whole new past; a past which, from constant repetition and elaboration, she could easily come to believe in herself. When she told people she met for the first time about the terrible car accident which had killed her parents when she was a small child, the looks of sympathy seemed so much easier to deal with than the dark suspicions which had always accompanied her before she left England. So real did her newly invented history become, and so solid did her made-up identity feel, that eventually it seemed to her to be entirely possible that she could move back to England in the persona of the woman she had created.
When the authorities informed her that what was left of the original Bannerman family had changed their names and moved to another part of the country, and that the elder brother Martin was still being kept in a secure unit with no imminent prospect of release, she felt it was worth the risk of returning to the town she had known as a child. She moved back to Brighton, managed to get an apartment and a job in the travel agency, and effectively reinvented herself once again. Alison Parsons had made a few good friends among the young women at work but had not found any boyfriends until she caught the eye of a good-looking young man across a noisy and crowded bar. The attraction had been powerful and instant, and nothing could have given her even the smallest indication of the extraordinary events which were shortly to unfold.
The empathy she had immediately felt with another person who had also lost his parents at a young age had reinforced the bond between them, but now she marveled that the coincidence had not disturbed her until she discovered the photograph, and the pieces all tumbled into place. Only then did she put together the reason that his grandmother had reacted as she had on her first visit to Greenacres, and everything else up to the point where Michael had been mistaken for the Madman. The realization of her shared history with the man she had fallen in love with hit her with the force of a juggernaut, and now she was sitting on a public bench in the center of London, with absolutely no idea what on earth she should do next.
The only moment of even small relief she had experienced in the last day and a half was when she heard the news that Michael had been released from police custody. Hours later she saw his call coming in on her cell phone but had not yet been able to find it within herself to reply, simply because she did not have the first idea of what she could possibly say.
Alison put away the photograph and set off for the short walk towards the meeting which she had arranged by telephone on the previous evening. A few minutes later she could see through the window of the Starbucks on Trafalgar Square that Joanna had arrived ahead of her and was sitting on a stool and slowly turning a spoon through the foam on the top of her coffee. There were only a handful of other people in the place, and so after she had ordered her drink, Alison gestured to a table in the corner where there was a better chance of keeping their conversation private. The two women sat opposite each other for a moment, as though sizing up the enemy before battle. Recent years seemed to have been more kind to Joanna than those she experienced at the children’s home, but still Alison thought that she had the look of someone whose life was a battle against adversity. Her bleached hair was showing half an inch of dark roots, and her makeup seemed designed to terrify. Eventually it was Joanna who spoke first.
“So have you told the police yet?”
“Have I told them what?”
Joanna looked at Alison with an expression which suggested that she knew the answer to her own question. “Have you told them that you know the name and identity of someone who answers the description of the Madman and who has a proven liking for drowning tiny children?”
Alison knew that she had made many mistakes in her life, but now she understood that one of the greatest of them had been to confide in a person she had once considered a friend her belief that Martin Bannerman had deliberately murdered his baby sister. When Alison had first been placed into care, aged only eight years, the circumstances which had sent her there were nationally notorious. Everyone was curious to meet the girl whom the press had dubbed an evil monster. She had not been named in court, but of course it was impossible to keep these things a secret. She had resolved from the beginning not to discuss her memories or experience with anyone, and it was only to Joanna that she confided her suspicion that Martin had known exactly what he was doing; that all along he had intended to murder the baby.
“No, I haven’t. First, because I have not seen or heard from him since he was three years old, and so I would have no way to know whether or not he resembles the descriptions of the Madman. Second, we don’t know for certain that he killed his baby sister because it might well have been an accident. Third, I have absolutely no idea where he is—for all I know he may still be in custody. And last, I don’t believe for one moment that Martin is the person who has been taking every possible opportunity to throw tiny children to their deaths.”
Alison had no clue about where the look of malevolence on Joanna’s face came from or why it should be there. While the two girls had not gone their separate ways as friends, they had not been enemies either. Nonetheless, when Joanna spoke again her words were full of poison.
“Look, Lizzie,” she said, “I asked you nicely to warn the police, and then I asked you a bit less nicely, and wh
en I sent you those texts, it was just because I worked out, like you must have done, that you know who the Madman really is. What I didn’t know then, but can work out just like you can, is the reason why the Madman is the spitting image of your new boyfriend. He must be his brother, which is partly why dear Michael was arrested. So the fact that Martin looks like Michael, and has a nasty habit of drowning babies, sort of gives you the complete answer.”
Alison felt a repeat of the same shudder she had experienced when she had first looked at the photograph from Michael’s pocket, but this time it transitioned into a wave of anger which was reflected in the tone and volume of her reply. “What the hell are you talking about, you dozy bitch?”
The environment they had shared as children guaranteed that neither of them was easily intimidated, and now Joanna leaned across the table, her face almost touching Alison’s, and spat out her reply.
“Because, you stupid fucking cow, I can work it out. Just as you must have worked it out. If it was Martin who has been doing these killings, and your Michael has been arrested, chances are that Michael must be the spitting image of Martin. Or to put it even more simply for you”—and now Joanna’s voice rose another few decibels and was attracting the attention of their neighbors at other tables—“either Martin is the killer, and for some reason you aren’t grassing him up. Or it really is your boyfriend, Michael, and you and Martin are covering up for him.” Her short speech ended with a snarl. “Geddit?”
Everyone in the coffee shop turned as the collection of cups and saucers and plates and condiments hit the floor with a clatter, and the noise of the crash bounced around the sharp corners of the walls and ceiling. At first no one seemed inclined to intervene as the two young women grabbed at each other’s hair and fell, struggling and scratching, onto the hard tiles. Three or four young helpers who had come to London from various parts of Eastern Europe ran back and forth in panic, and a full thirty seconds passed before the most senior of them reached down and grabbed Joanna by the collar of her jacket and dragged her backwards. By now both girls’ faces were a mass of cuts and scrapes, but Alison was still screaming to be allowed access to her enemy.
“She knows who the Madman is,” Joanna was shouting. “She knows and hasn’t told the police.”
“I don’t know anything of the kind, you stupid bitch.” But now every survival instinct that Alison had learned through her years in the children’s home kicked in, and all she wanted to do was to retreat. She scrambled to her feet and steadied herself on the edge of the table, turning towards the man who had been restraining her and shaking herself free. “Sorry about the mess.”
NINETEEN
Michael gradually became aware of the sound of a bell ringing. At first he thought it was coming from inside his head, but then it seemed to have been going on forever, and he realized that he was in his apartment and it was the telephone next to his grandmother’s bed. The sound was joined up to such an extent that there was no way to detect whether the same person was calling repeatedly, or there was a queue of people trying to contact him, one after another, in a way which had the effect of an unbroken series. From time to time he reached across from where he lay and lifted the handset an inch from the cradle and replaced it. The ringing would stop for perhaps ten seconds, only to begin afresh. Eventually he reached over and pulled the connecting wire from the socket in the wall.
The only people who had the landline number, to his knowledge, were the management at Hand-Cutz, and Michael presumed that whoever had sold his identity and details to the press had also revealed the phone number at the apartment. He had little doubt that the calls would be from journalists, and he was equally certain that he had nothing to say.
Michael did not know how long he had been lying in his grandmother’s room. The sky had turned from blue to urban yellow, and the shadows cast upon the walls were tinted from the light of streetlamps. He could hear in the background the continuous hum of distant traffic, and the only other discernible sound was the ticking of a pendulum clock, which he had wound up every week for as long as he could remember.
Just as his mind floated over any one aspect of what he had learned in recent hours, some other aspect appeared to be more urgent and fought for precedence. At first he thought that the vital priority was to consider what now seemed to be the unavoidable answer to the mystery of the identical voiceprint and mistaken identity. But then, nothing was more demanding than the fact that the woman he had fallen in love with had in some way been partly responsible for the death of his baby sister. The information was too shocking and fresh for him to begin to come to terms with everything it meant, but at the very least, it felt impossible that Alison could ever again be his lover. He had left several messages on her phone but was almost relieved when she did not pick up.
Eventually it was clear to Michael that the most important thing he needed to focus on was the revelation that he had a brother who was just a year older than he was. The experts had said that only one in a million other people might have a voiceprint which matched his so exactly, but they had not commented on the likelihood of a match between siblings. Add to that the mystery of how Michael had managed to appear in the video taken in Brighton that Sunday afternoon, but wearing clothes he knew he had not been wearing, and circumstances seemed to be pulling inexorably towards only one conclusion. If he added the further revelation that his brother had originally been taken away from their family because of his involvement in drowning a small child, there appeared to be little further room for doubt. He had been asked by the police to consider whether there might be anyone out there who hated him enough to wish to implicate him in the most appalling crimes of his lifetime, and now his brain was splitting itself in two as part of it was pulled towards an unavoidable conclusion, and an equal and opposite part of it was attempting to resist.
What, though, was he to do with this information? The first and most obvious thing must be to take it to the police: to tell them everything he had learned in the last few hours and leave it to them to find and arrest his older brother. However, there did seem to be an alternative, which might be to do nothing with the authorities for the moment, but to locate and track down his brother to satisfy himself as to whether or not he was the person the police were looking for. A third possibility was, of course, that he could pull a blanket over his head, sleep for a thousand years, and hope that if and when he woke up the nightmare might be over. At that moment the third alternative seemed by far the most attractive.
Michael must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew he was still lying, fully clothed, on top of the covers on his grandmother’s bed but was feeling cold and shivery. The streetlamps outside had been switched off, and the room was too dark for him to be able to make out the time by the clock; only the sound of its apparently perpetual ticking reminded him of where he was. He pulled up the duvet and slid under it, still fully clothed.
His thoughts turned back to Alison and that most important of life’s lessons he had learned from his grandmother: always to do his best to put himself in the shoes of the other person. Try as he might, however, he could not find a way into what must have been going on inside the head of his lover all this time. There were so many unanswered questions. Still he did not know what her true role had been in the death of his baby sister. He knew little or nothing of her real experience when she had been taken into care. Nor did he know for sure whether or not she had any idea of his own identity when they had first met. He thought once again about the overheard telephone conversation in the apartment in Brighton, the mysterious text she had received when they were walking on the cliff top. Who could the text have been from? THERE’S NO POINT IN TRYING TO PROTECT HIM. Who had she been trying to protect? Himself? Someone else? The killer? Now he again considered the gray hoodie which had appeared in his apartment at the time she had gone there to collect clothes for his court appearance. Surely she couldn’t have been involved in framing him. Michael cast his mind back once again t
o that first time he had taken Alison to Greenacres and Rose’s dreadful reaction upon seeing her.
Then he remembered what Alison had said in the car after they drove away from Greenacres on the day of the first Madman killings. About how the witnesses had simply been unlucky to be in a certain place at a certain time and had unwillingly become a party to an event which would haunt the rest of their lives. From that perspective, Alison was as much a victim of circumstance as he was, and it was only by sheer chance of the calendar and their relative ages that he had not found himself in exactly the situation in which she found herself. “There but for the grace of God,” he whispered, but there was no one there to hear him.
There were so many questions and so few answers, but whatever they would turn out to be, Michael desperately wanted to believe that Alison had loved him, and from the bottom of his heart he hoped against hope that the generous interpretation he so badly wanted to put on all of her actions would turn out to be justified.
Now, though, the woman who had sacrificed her life for him was lying in a hospital ward ten miles away, stricken by yet another tragedy which had befallen their family. Of course she was eighty-five and already seriously ill, but Michael had no doubt that the shock of hearing that her grandson had been arrested for murder had pushed her over the edge. Even with all the anxieties and concerns which had arisen from the many revelations he had been given in the last hours, it remained his greatest wish that his grandmother would regain consciousness for long enough to hear and understand that he, Michael, was not guilty of anything; that he remained the devoted and loving grandson she had brought him up to be. If he could be granted that and only that, he thought, he would ask for nothing else.
* * *
Michael’s telephone call to the police incident room was answered by a junior officer who sounded as though she had been working for longer hours than might have been wise. When Michael gave his name, however, he immediately got her full attention. He had been the only suspect seriously under consideration for the Madman murders, and so was well known to the hundreds of officers of all ranks who were allocated to the inquiry. When he asked to speak to Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Bailey, he was asked to hold, but he waited for less than a minute before the voice he recognized came on the line.
The Bridge Page 19
