by Neil White
‘Tell me about your sister,’ Sam said.
‘Adrianne was a lovely, sweet girl. What else can I say? We weren’t like close friends because she was nearly ten years younger than me, but she was my baby sister. I looked out for her.’ Her expression grew sad. ‘I had to. Our parents were killed in a car crash, because someone sold them a dangerous car, the pedals sticking, so it fell to me to look after Adrianne, and this place.’ She gestured with her hands to the house. ‘Or rather, I was supposed to.’ A deep breath. ‘However sweet she was, teenage years are hell and there’s nothing new in that. That night, I didn’t know where she’d gone. She was a handful; she would say she was going out and then there’d be the slam of the door. I’d question her when she got back, but there was always some reason why she couldn’t tell me where she was going. There’d always be a party at the weekend, someone somewhere having a gathering, but why do these people let their houses get used like that? So yes, I lost control of her, but I’d had no lessons in being a parent. I was only in my twenties, wanted my own life, and due to —’ She stopped to compose herself. ‘Due to an accident, the job fell to me. Adrianne would be fine, or so I thought. I imagined us being best friends when she was older, and we’d laugh at how she tormented me, because that’s what teenagers do.’
‘I’m a policeman,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how many parents I’ve sat with who can’t work out how their child ended up in a police station.’
‘That was Adrianne all right,’ she said.
‘Tell me how she died?’
Helena took a deep breath. ‘There was something funny about that night. Adrianne caught a bus and got off at a stop further along than she should have done. I’ve seen the footage from the bus, the police showed me. She was acting normally, but she went past her stop and waited for the next one. No one followed her. But why get off at the next stop? Why end up walking the way she did? It meant going down a long alley, past warehouses, a really long dark walk home.’
‘What do you think about that?’ Sam said.
‘Putting off the argument when she gets in, I suppose, which makes me feel like it was partly my fault.’
Sam wondered whether the answer was something different: was Adrianne trying to make it look as though she was coming from a different direction, covering up where she’d actually been, because she had a forbidden love? And was that forbidden love her teacher?
‘Were there any suspects?’ Sam said.
Helena’s jaw tightened. ‘No, none.’
‘Did she have a boyfriend or anything?’
‘Not that she told me about.’
‘So you’re no nearer to finding out who did it?’
‘No, and that’s the most difficult part.’ She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Do you want to know about the burglary? It’s happened before. I can show you?’
‘Yes, I might be able to help,’ Sam said.
She stood up. ‘Follow me.’
As she took Sam along the hallway and through the kitchen, she said, ‘Mark isn’t a bad man. I don’t know why he does it. He likes nice things, I suppose, or perhaps it’s the thrill of it, every year wondering when it’s going to collapse. I know it got a bit dicey a few years ago, when the banking crash happened, because people were getting worried and didn’t want to renew, but he charmed them. Told them that the returns would be lower but now was a time to stay calm and hold their nerve. I heard him on the phone once. When the call ended, he was just normal, as if there’d never been a problem.’
They went into the darkness of the garden, their footsteps soft on the grass.
‘And you’ll say all this in court? Put it in a statement?’
Helena nodded. ‘I don’t want to get dragged into it, and I don’t want people – his clients – to start coming here.’
They were heading towards a large building at the bottom of the garden, like a garage but with no driveway in front of it. When Helena reached the door, she moved it, making it creak.
‘Someone took off the hinges,’ she said.
Sam stepped forward to look and saw what she meant. The double doors were hanging only from the right-hand hinges, both held together by a padlock in the centre.
He pulled on the door so that it opened like a wide gate and stepped inside. Helena reached round him to flick on the light switch.
‘Has anything else been taken?’ Sam said, looking around. It was like the inside of a garage, the walls filled with tools, but dominated by a large chair and deep rug. The air was cold and there was a slight smell of damp, as if the lack of warmth or air was taking over the carpet. There were candles on tables, spaced randomly, but they would not be enough to provide heat. Sam put his hand on the chair. The leather felt cold.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘He’ll be angry about that, because he calls this his special place. There’s a word for it: a man-cave. Men need somewhere to escape to, don’t you think? It keeps them happy. Your man should be happy. I know that’s old-fashioned, but it’s how I feel. Mark loves it down here. Spends all his time here, on his own, reading, or sometimes just contemplating. It does look nice when the candles are lit. It used be my father’s workshop. I’m glad that Mark’s kept it special.’
She went over to a workbench and bent down to move the cloth that hung down over the edge. ‘He kept his box of accounts here, but they’re gone now.’
Sam looked under the table. There was nothing there. ‘Do you want to make an official report?’ he said, hoping that the answer was no.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask Mark.’
Sam reached into his pocket and produced a business card. ‘If you need to speak to me about anything, will you call me? Let us do something about what he did to your face.’
Helena shook her head. ‘It was an accident.’
‘And is there any way I can contact you without Mark knowing?’
Helena gave him an email address. Sam jotted it down. ‘It’s on my phone, he doesn’t use it,’ she said, and she blushed.
Sam went to leave when Helena said, ‘Will you do something else for me?’
‘What is it?’
‘See if you can find out if there’s any progress in my sister’s case. I know I won’t get updates now unless something big is about to happen, but even something small might mean something.’
Sam smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
As he walked along the garden and back towards his car, he could feel Helena watching him all the way.
Sixty-three
‘So how did it go?’ Gina said, as Sam got back into the car outside Proctor’s house.
As he set off, he said, ‘Joe got the box from the workshop.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She told me the workshop had been burgled and took me down there.’
‘So where’s Joe? What’s he doing with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘But there’s something else: Proctor hit her. Her face is swollen and her eye looks bad.’
Gina was surprised. ‘She wasn’t like that earlier.’
‘No, but since then someone has broken in and stolen his accounts, and it looks like it made him angry.’
‘Will she make a complaint? It would give you the chance to look into Proctor properly. Get her away from him, get all of his secrets.’
‘No, she wasn’t interested in complaining about the assault, but she’s worried about the money, scared it’s going to come back to her somehow.’
‘What’s his scam?’
‘Pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, call them whatever you like, but it sounds like she’s been waiting all of their married life for it to come crashing down and she’s scared she’ll get dragged into it. You get that a lot with financial fraudsters: they dig themselves into a hole and it’s the arrest that gives them the courage to start over.’
‘That’s a strange way of looking at it,’ Gina said. ‘Not having an alternative isn’t t
he same as having courage.’
‘I’ve seen the relief, though, because they knew the day was always going to come; we all put off the bad stuff, it’s human nature. When they’re forced to confront it, I’ve seen the weight come off them.’
Gina frowned at that but just said, ‘How did you get her to open up?’
‘She just did, almost as if she’d been dying to tell someone. Proctor has taken thousands from people, and even gets them to reinvest, although it’s not really a reinvestment. It’s just putting off for a few more years the news that Proctor has taken their money and spent it on cars and holidays. There’s no proof there, though, and it makes it tricky if my brother has stolen the accounts. If Brabham finds out I was here, he’ll be after me.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘You know why. Justice for Ellie.’
‘Go to the financial crimes unit then. Be a confidential informant, or whatever’s the current buzzword.’
‘That will take time, and there’ll be nobody there right now.’
Gina looked out of the window as she thought about that. She was silent for a few streets and then said, ‘I want the same as you, justice for Ellie. If Proctor has been hiding things all this time, we should have spotted him, because he was creeping around crime victims. But he must come across well, because he even got Helena to fall for him, a victim’s sister. It’s almost bloody romantic.’
‘I’m not going to stop looking,’ Sam said. ‘We need something solid to link him. He’s a fraudster who’s plausible, a conman, but that’s not the same as proving he’s a murderer.’
‘It makes him a good psychopath, though,’ she said.
‘How come?’
‘Something you said earlier, about how fraudsters always seem relieved when they’re caught. That won’t be the case with all of them, and the ones who aren’t relieved are the ones to worry about.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not following you.’
‘I don’t want to pull my experience on you, that’s not fair,’ Gina said, ‘but I’ve met a lot more murderers than you have. Not all murderers are psychopaths, but the ones who are have recognisable traits: they’re charming, plausible, persuasive, but remorseless; they have no fear of the consequences. Do those traits sound familiar with someone like Proctor?’
‘It’s pretty much how Helena described him.’
‘Do you know what Ian Brady once said about serial killers?’
‘I can’t wait to hear this.’
‘That what separates them from ordinary people is that they’re brave because they live out their fantasies without any fear,’ Gina said. ‘He wrote a book about them, Gates of Janus. Not his own murders, but his warped insight into people who kill. What he didn’t realise was that he got it the wrong way round, because for a psychopath fear of the consequences doesn’t register. If there’s no fear, where’s the bravery? So what Brady said was just grandiose bullshit, and guess what: grandiose bullshit is another sign of a psychopath. Kind of ironic that rather than defining a psychopath, Brady just flagged up another trait he couldn’t control in himself.’
‘So are you saying that Proctor’s financial frauds are a sign that he killed people?’
‘Just that being a fraudster doesn’t make him only a fraudster. Psychopaths are risk-takers. His scams sound like he lives his life taking risks, except he doesn’t see them as risks in the same way most people do, because risk involves some fear of the consequences. Answer me this, Sam: if you were running his schemes, how would you be?’
Sam thought about that as they made their slow way through the city centre, to where Gina lived.
‘I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night,’ he said.
‘Through guilt for your victims?’
‘Partly, or at least I’d like to think so.’
‘There you go, another trait: a lack of empathy. He’s taken a lot of money from a lot of people – perhaps people who can’t afford to lose it – and he’s spent it like it doesn’t matter.’
‘It’s not just that, though,’ Sam said. ‘It goes back to what I said, that I’d be expecting everything to come crashing down at any moment. I’d be waiting for the knock on the door, for the rattle of handcuffs.’
‘That’s what Proctor doesn’t feel; he couldn’t possibly run scams like that for all those years if he did. Not all fraudsters are psychopaths, but a lot of bankers are.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We keep digging. I’m going to see what else I can find out. If he keeps trophies, there must be other victims. Let me ask around about any unsolved murders and missing persons.’
‘Good idea,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve still got some things I can be looking through. I’ll call you later.’
They were both silent for the rest of the journey to Gina’s house, each contemplating their next move. Sam knew what he would be doing: the No One Tells site. He reckoned he’d worked out the reason for the vodkagirl profile. He just needed to prove who she was.
When he pulled up outside her house, Gina said, ‘I need to talk to Joe.’
‘He hasn’t been in touch with me.’
‘If he does, get him to call me. I need to know how he’s getting on.’
Sam smiled. ‘Will do.’
The house felt silent when Gina got home. She’d started to notice it more recently; she was surrounded by familiarity, by pictures and trinkets she’d picked up over the years, but it was the absence of another human voice that she noticed the most.
She turned on the radio, feeling better when there were voices in the house. It was just some local station having a late-evening phone-in, but she enjoyed the inanity of it, even though it was just the sound of other lonely people hiding behind opinions to mask their real need to talk to someone else.
But she didn’t hesitate for long. It was the vibrations of other lives she needed, not the words, and she knew her evening would become serious again. This was just a quiet moment before she got on the phone and rooted out all her old contacts, asking them to trace any old unsolved murders, or even missing persons. She needed to see whether Mark Proctor would show up somewhere else.
The wine bottle clinked as she took it out of the fridge and poured a glass. A fresh New Zealand sauvignon blanc, part of a case she’d received from a wine club. She knew she was drinking too much but she justified it to herself by calling it her little treat. Regardless, she felt like she’d earned it and took the glass upstairs to drink as she took a long bath.
She lit candles in the bathroom and let the hot water wrap around her as she lay back. The radio was still playing, and she enjoyed the way the gentle murmurs mingled with the soft lap of the water. The rigours of the day faded and she thought about the rest of the evening ahead. She needed the respite.
She was reaching for her razor when the radio stopped.
The electricity had tripped. It did that too often, ever since she’d had a new circuit board fitted, as if it was too sensitive to any variation. Plugging something in or turning on the oven could shut a circuit down.
She could wait until she finished her bath but the annoyance had spoiled the mood.
She stepped out of the bath and went back towards her bedroom, a towel around her, her hands feeling the walls as she got away from the candlelight in the bathroom.
There was a noise.
She stopped. It had come from downstairs. A metallic clunk. Gina held her breath and listened, waiting for it to repeat. There was nothing. It must have been outside, a gate clanging or something similar.
She threw off her towel and scrambled around her drawers for some clothes she could quickly throw on. Sweatpants and a T-shirt.
The house felt strange. Gina couldn’t pin it down, but something wasn’t right. It was as if she could hear someone’s presence even though everything was silent. She stood stock still, listening out. Nothing.
The bedroom door opened with a creak as Gina moved slowly onto the landing. Her hand reached for the banister
as she listened out again. Still nothing. There was some light creeping in from a streetlight outside, but it made shadows that shifted as she walked.
‘Hello?’
Gina didn’t know what made her shout. She was certain she was alone but some instinct told her she might be wrong. It was hard to define.
