Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

“She knew the court would be understanding about the baby snatch,” Lloyd said. “They usually are, and she had been through several traumatic experiences.”

  “Certainly more understanding about that than they would be about her murdering her mother,” said Judy.

  Lloyd sighed. “It’s like the old joke about the man who murdered his parents and asked for clemency because he was an orphan.”

  “And she’s a juvenile—nothing would appear in the papers that could identify her, so no one at the Riverside Nursery would be able to put two and two together. And whatever the court did—wherever she ended up—Andrea could join her.”

  A silence fell while they both thought about how it had so very nearly succeeded.

  “You know,” said Lloyd, “I wished all the time that you were working on the investigation with me, but if you had been, we’d never have known. It was only because you were at the Riverside Nursery when she was there and saw her again today that she was caught. Sheer coincidence—not detective work.”

  Judy was very well aware of that. “I know. So you might not forgive me for scuppering the wedding, because I’m not sure how much hard evidence we’ve actually got.”

  “Well, you and Tom are eyewitnesses. And the Riverside Nursery staff might be able to recognize Kayleigh or Emma, or both. There’s the pram—someone’s prints are on it, so let’s hope they’re Kayleigh’s. And the lab will take a closer look at the bloodstained clothes and the photographs of the utility room—they might be able to prove that one of the dresses was placed there after the murder. I don’t suppose the doll will be of much use—”

  Judy hadn’t thought about the doll. “Oh, but it could be,” she said. “They’re quite often limited editions. If we can trace the people who made it, they might know who they sold it to.”

  Lloyd smiled. “Well, there you are. And we can get experts to tell us where and when the doll had to have entered the river to be seen where Tom saw it—”

  “Even so. Like Tom says, Kayleigh will have a contingency plan.”

  “She very probably had one for running away with Andrea if we got too close for comfort,” said Lloyd. “I’m sure she would have worked out how they could just disappear. But I doubt very much if she had one for actually getting caught. This was all or nothing. She was taking a huge risk—any one of the people who went to the cottage could have caught her in the act.” He stood up. “Well, we can’t interview her until her foster father gets here. But Andrea can be talked to now. And without Kayleigh pulling the strings, I don’t think Andrea will hold out for very long.”

  Judy brightened when she realized that. Andrea didn’t have nerves of steel, as Tom had discovered.

  “We’re going to be here for a long time yet,” Lloyd said. “You’d better ring Tom and tell him not to expect us at the reception.”

  “Right,” said Judy, dialing his mobile number. “And I’ll get him to organize transport for those who need it.” She waited until the door closed before letting it ring and was relieved to get Tom immediately. “Tom,” she said, employing her very best wheedle, “do you think you could do something for me?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Theresa.

  “Yes, of course,” said Ian.

  She felt sorry for him because his new house was less than welcoming at the moment. The cottage would be going back on the market as soon as the police said that it was all right to have the utility room sorted out, and he was renting a small semi-detached. It needed a bit doing to it, but as soon as he could get about without crutches, he would set about making the place more like home.

  “I can do everything except walk properly.” He was worried about her, rather than thinking she should be worried about him. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “About Kayleigh—you know perfectly well about what. You’re not going to carry on trying to adopt her, are you?”

  “If Phil wants to, and I’m sure he will.” Theresa, who had been on the point of leaving, sat down on the sofa. “What’s so strange about that?”

  Ian gave an unamused laugh. “Theresa, the police didn’t arrest her and Andrea on a whim. They murdered Lesley.” Poor Lesley, he thought, remembering his baffled response to her worries about Andrea. She had been right, and the unhealthy relationship had become even more destructive than she could have imagined.

  No wonder Dean what’shisname had got out of the cottage as fast as he could. He had already been on the receiving end of Kayleigh’s machinations, and Ian could well understand that he had not wanted to get involved in any more of them. And since Dean hadn’t murdered Lesley, Ian doubted very much that what had happened to him had been deliberate; if he could get the police to drop the charge of attempted murder, he would. It seemed to him that those who got involved with Kayleigh had enough to contend with.

  “She was calmly letting that ex-boyfriend of hers take the blame,” he added. “And if he hadn’t turned up, it could have been Phil himself who was being charged. Do you think she would have let that happen, too?”

  Theresa’s eyes filled with tears, and her hand went to her mouth. “Poor Phil,” she said.

  “Poor Phil? He can walk away from it—Kayleigh’s got nothing to do with him now!”

  She looked at him exactly as she had when he had told her he was going to Australia, with disbelief and a hint of anger. “She has everything to do with him. He’s been trying to get her treatment for years—it’s Lesley’s own fault that she’s dead! She should have listened to what Phil was telling her. The child is ill.”

  “Even so—”

  “Even so, nothing. If she was Phil’s real daughter, then I’d be her stepmother whether I liked it or not, and that’s what I’ll be, if that’s what he wants. She needs his help, and he needs someone to help him.”

  Ian held up his hands in surrender. He admired Phil Roddam for what he was prepared to do, but he thought Theresa had taken leave of her senses. He remembered thinking that Kayleigh would be much better off with Theresa and he still believed that, but he didn’t think that Theresa would be better off with Kayleigh. She was one hell of a responsibility.

  And ashamed though he would be to admit it to anyone—even Theresa—the little part of him that cut through all the layers of half truths, manufactured emotions, and assumed airs was telling him that he should really be grateful to Kayleigh for making certain, before it was too late, that she was never going to be his responsibility.

  Kayleigh listened to what Chief Inspector Lloyd was saying, her solicitor on one side, her foster father, looking perplexed, on the other. Andrea had told Lloyd everything, of course, but that didn’t matter. There wasn’t really any way back from here.

  It was a shame that woman had seen her at the nursery, because even with all these things happening that she hadn’t bargained for, it had worked. No one had seen her the first time she had gone to the nursery with Emma, when she had arranged, a month in advance, to leave her there for a few hours while she kept a business appointment. And that had been far more risky; her mother and Ian were both in Malworth that day and could have happened by at the wrong time. When she actually left Emma there, they were safely in Stansfield; it hadn’t occurred to her that there was any risk at all.

  The plan had worked. She had thought, from the moment her mother had said they were going to Australia, that there was only one way to stop it, but she hadn’t been able to work out how she could do it without getting caught. It had been when she and Andrea had been walking in the park with Emma that she had begun to realize that she could give herself an alibi.

  She had been wishing that her mother had never adopted her, and that had made her think about Alexandra and about how desperate some people were to have babies. They adopted them, they had test-tube babies, they used other people to have them for them, and sometimes, she had thought, sometimes they even stole them. And the thought of substituting one crime—one that people understood and barely even
thought of as a crime—for the one that she intended carrying out had come to her. After all, she had had to give her baby up for adoption, and wasn’t that just the sort of thing that made people steal babies?

  She and Andrea already dressed alike, so the idea of making people believe that they had seen her in the park when she was in fact somewhere else altogether had presented itself almost instantly. The other things were easy; she had bought the doll from America, over the Internet, and had given Andrea the money to buy the baby clothes and a secondhand pram, which she had kept in the boot of the car until it was needed.

  All of that was in place before she had any idea of how she was actually going to do it, but then the people who were buying their house had come to her rescue. Ian had taken them to the cottage, told her how he used to play in the woods, how you could walk to the town through them. While her mother had been in the cottage seeing what was what, Kayleigh had explored, and by the time they were on their way back to Malworth she had known exactly what she was going to do. She had worked out a way of doing it believing that it would be a removal van that would take their stuff to the cottage; when Ian had suddenly insisted on doing it himself, she had been worried. But as it turned out, that had worked out even better.

  In fact, the whole thing had worked far better than she could have hoped; Andrea had told her that she hadn’t even had to tell the police that she had left Emma with her, because Sergeant Finch had told her that she had. The police had worked out her alibi for themselves. And once Andrea realized that Emma was safe and well, she had told the story that they had rehearsed together.

  But when Kayleigh had seen that woman this morning, with Chief Inspector Lloyd, of all people, and then the man with the curly blond hair, who turned out to be Sergeant Finch, she had known it was over, unless they could get away. And they couldn’t.

  So she had told the solicitor the truth, and she had admitted killing her mother when Lloyd had asked her the straight question.

  “Do you want to tell me your side of the story?”

  “My client doesn’t want to make any further comment at this point,” said the solicitor. “Except to say that she is currently receiving psychiatric treatment, which could, of course, have a bearing on her defense.”

  “Was Dean Fletcher in any way involved in the conspiracy to murder Mrs. Newton?”

  “No. No one. Just me and Andrea.”

  “Very well, Kayleigh, interview terminated at thirteen-twen—”

  “Wait. I want to say something else.”

  All three of them looked at her, their faces alarmed at what she might be going to say. But it wasn’t anything awful, just something she thought she ought to say. She regretted, in a way, what she had done to Dean before all of this. He had been quite brave, coming to Stansfield to see the baby like he had, to have his photograph taken with her. She hadn’t meant him to get charged with the murder. And there was one way she could make amends.

  “I lied at Dean’s trial,” she said. “I said I told him my real name and how old I was. And that I thought he was a boy of my own age. But I didn’t. He did believe I was eighteen. I did know how old he was when I went to meet him. And he really didn’t know who the police were talking about when they asked him about me. It wasn’t the way I said.” She looked at Lloyd, at her solicitor. “Can he appeal or something? I’ll tell the truth this time. And I’ll let them see me dressed up, if that’ll help. Because he shouldn’t be on that register.”

  Lloyd nodded slowly. “Since he was only twenty-three when it happened, believing you were sixteen or over is a valid defense,” he said. “It might be worth his while to seek leave to appeal, if you’re now saying that you did mislead him. Why did you do that?”

  People were very slow, Kayleigh felt. Always wanting explanations for things that were perfectly obvious. “Because he wouldn’t have had anything to do with me if he’d known how old I really was.”

  “Why did you lie about it?”

  That was a question that didn’t have an obvious answer, because Kayleigh wasn’t sure why she had done that. She had wanted to be with Dean more than anything in the world, and then . . . well, then she hadn’t. Not because of the pregnancy—that hadn’t meant much to her one way or the other. Just because. She didn’t know why, but she had felt angry, and she had wanted to make him pay for . . . for something. Like Luke. She didn’t know why she’d done that, either. She had loved him once, too. And her mother. She didn’t know now why staying with Andrea had seemed so important.

  “I’m not sure why I do anything,” she said. “But I wish I didn’t.”

  Theresa parked the van and let herself into the flats. Now, she had to set about reassuring Phil that she was just as prepared to go ahead with trying to adopt Kayleigh as she had ever been.

  The truth was, she admitted to herself, as she went up the stairs, that she was considerably happier about it than she had been, because whatever happened now, Kayleigh was going to be under someone else’s roof—preferably a secure one—until she had reached and passed the age of majority and would not, after all, be coming to live with her and Phil. So, she thought with a sad little smile, she wasn’t just as mad as Ian thought she was or just as self-sacrificing as Phil thought she was.

  And she was relieved that the dark thoughts she had harbored about each of them, prompted by Chief Inspector Lloyd’s certainty that someone close to Lesley had killed her, had been completely wrong.

  Lloyd, however, had been right, and looking at it from a purely selfish point of view, if anyone had to have murdered Lesley Newton, Theresa was glad it had been Kayleigh.

  “Visitor.”

  Dean looked up, startled. No one ever visited him. Please God, don’t let it be Kayleigh, he thought as he followed the guard. He was let into the visitors’ room, its tables empty except for one, at which sat his solicitor.

  Dean sat down wearily. “Now what?” he asked.

  “You remember I told you that you were lucky?”

  Dean raised his eyebrows slightly. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lucky Dean.”

  “Well, I’ve just had a call from the police in Stansfield.”

  Thirty seconds later, the whoops and hollers echoed in the big, empty room and the guard rushed in, thinking someone was being murdered.

  But Dean wasn’t a murderer, and now, at last, they believed him about that. And with any luck, he wasn’t going to be a sex offender for much longer. Unless, of course, such offenses included kissing a solicitor without his consent.

  “She does know,” said Liz, “that she has to come into the ladies’ room as soon as she gets here?”

  “Yes, she knows.” Tom had agreed to try to do Judy’s favor for her and it had been very hard work, but he’d done it. Liz had produced the condition as soon as she knew what was happening.

  “Don’t tell her why,” she had said. “Just tell her. She has to promise on her honor to go to the ladies’ room before she does anything else, or the deal’s off.”

  Lloyd made his way back to his office, rubbing the tension out of the back of his neck. Phil Roddam had told him that Kayleigh always had a plan, but no one had realized how grand or how ruthless a plan it had been.

  Judy still sat there, still looking cool and calm and uncreased, unlike him. “Right,” he said. “I think that’s it, and as far as I can recall, I’m on holiday now. It was going to be a honeymoon, but my bride-to-be turned into a gundog.”

  Judy smiled and got up. “The car’s still at the Civic Centre.”

  He walked with her through the shoppers to the other side of the town center. First Charlotte, four weeks early. Then an arrest. What would Judy manage to do next time he tried to marry her? Though he wondered if there would be a next time. She could put it off forever now.

  “We could see if the registrar’s still there,” she said.

  That startled him, until he realized that she was only offering because she knew the registrar would have gone long ago. “They close at one,”
he said. “It’s nearly two o’clock now.”

  “You never know. They might still be there.”

  Lloyd shrugged. He supposed she was trying to make up for what had happened, but it was a waste of time. “You do know that it’s legal as long as it’s before six?”

  Judy frowned. “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, I just thought you were perhaps thinking of a way to marry me and get out of it later.” He stopped when they got to the Derbyshire. “Let’s go in and see if we can get something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

  “They’ll have stopped serving lunch.”

  “Then let’s go home and get something to eat.” He crossed the road to the car park, empty save for his Rover and a couple of other vehicles in the spaces reserved for the staff, and pointed the remote at the car, unlocking it.

  “We might as well try the registry office first,” she said as she arrived.

  He didn’t understand this. She knew they’d missed their chance for today. “Why?” he demanded. “It’s closed. It’s pointless. Even if she is still here, she won’t do it. Why do you want to try?”

  “Because I don’t want to go through more weeks of waiting for the wedding—I don’t like it. If we can get it over with today, I’d much rather do that. And these cars must belong to someone.”

  Get it over with. There wasn’t an ounce of romance in her.

  “Even if the registrar is here and is prepared to do it, Tom and Liz aren’t. We need witnesses.”

  “There’ll be cleaners, or something.”

  That wasn’t at all what he had had in mind. But it was true that the whole thing made her very nervous, and if there was any chance at all of marrying today, it would be better, from her point of view, to get it over with, as she so delicately put it.

  “All right,” he said, locking the car again. “Let’s go and find out. But she’ll have gone home hours ago.”