The Heron's Cry

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘And you killed Dr Yeo.’ Matthew’s voice was quiet. ‘If you could confirm that, Miss Mackenzie. We need it for the tape.’

  ‘Yes, I killed Dr Yeo. I smashed a large green vase on the workbench and I stuck a shard into his neck.’ She sounded defiant, almost gloating. So, Jen thought, I was right and she is a monster after all.

  ‘And had you planned that?’ Matthew asked. ‘Is that why you dropped Wesley at the end of the lane and walked up secretly? You knew you were going to kill Nigel?’ Again, the voice was quiet, deceptively conversational.

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was a wail and suddenly she seemed like a little girl again. ‘It was a nightmare. It was just like with Mack. He was talking and talking at me, giving me this lecture about how people with depression can be treated and their families can get them back. Yeo said I’d stolen Mack’s life when he could have been helped. And in the end, I just wanted to shut him up.’

  There was silence in the interview room. Outside a drunk was yelling, and an officer was telling him to be quiet.

  ‘Wesley told us he saw a car, driving very fast down the lane. Did he make that story up? To give you some sort of alibi?’

  ‘No,’ Janey said. She gave a little smile. Jen thought now she wanted them to know how clever she’d been. ‘That was me. I took Nigel’s keys and I drove his car fast down the lane. I almost knocked Wesley into the ditch. I left it on the Instow road and took my own car home. After a nightcap with Dad, and when everyone was asleep at home, I took Nigel’s car back.’

  ‘We didn’t find any fingerprints other than Nigel’s in his car,’ Venn said. ‘How was that?’

  ‘I had gloves in my vehicle.’ Again, she was showing them how she’d thought of everything. ‘Left over from walks in the winter.’

  ‘You made up the story about seeing a car speeding through Instow?’

  She nodded. ‘I thought you might take time looking for it.’

  ‘Then you walked home through Frank’s garden and over the common?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was that superior smile again. ‘It was almost morning when it was all done.’

  ‘But it wasn’t all done, was it?’ Matthew said. ‘Why did Wesley have to die? Did he recognize the car that nearly flattened him once he was sober? Or were you starting to take pleasure in the killing, Janey? Was that it? I’ve checked with the university. You specialized in Victorian fiction in Oxford and your dissertation was focused on the Gothic novel. There’s nothing more Gothic than a series of murders where the victims are found with different-coloured glass in the neck.’

  ‘No!’ She seemed shocked. Offended. But she gave the seductive smile all the same and Jen wasn’t convinced. ‘Of course I didn’t enjoy it.’ She paused. ‘There was a moon the night that Nigel died. It seemed that Wesley might have glimpsed my face when I almost drove into him. He wasn’t sure, he was drunk after all, but he phoned me the next day about it. Just gentle questions: “But that couldn’t be right, could it, Janey? I must have been imagining it. It must have been the killer rocketing down the lane like that.” Then the nice young policeman came to interview me and said he was going back to talk to Wes, to check out his story, so it seemed wise to make sure.’

  ‘Wesley loved you!’ Jen said. ‘He would have lied for you. There was no need to kill him.’

  Janey stared at her with eyes that were as cool and clear as glass. ‘I couldn’t take that chance.’ Again, Jen thought that after years of being in the background, feeling ignored while her parents cared for her brother, she was loving this starring role.

  Matthew continued with his questions. ‘So, you suggested meeting Wesley in his workshop at the Woodyard, and you knew that he’d come. As Sergeant Rafferty says, he’d always been sweet on you. According to Eve, you were the only woman he’d really cared for.’

  ‘Really? He was middle-aged. Virtually a pensioner.’ She gave a shiver of disgust, and then that smile again. ‘But yeah, I knew he’d be there if I asked him.’

  ‘And then it all became very elaborate, didn’t it, Miss Mackenzie?’ In the fierce light of the interview room, Jen could see that Matthew was getting very tired now, but he kept his focus, his full attention fixed on the young woman who sat opposite. ‘Using Wesley’s phone to text Eve. A bit of a game, was that? Rather cruel, we thought at the time.’

  There was no response from Janey, and Matthew continued. ‘The whole transport business was very clever, though. That did throw us off the scent for quite a while. Because your car was blocked in – we checked that – and your father was driving inland in the family vehicle. So how could you have got into Barnstaple to meet him? Lucy Braddick who works at the Woodyard gave us the answer to that. The bus from Bideford arrived there just before Wesley was killed. Lucy noticed because her friends were on it. She didn’t see you get off, but we’ve checked with the driver and he’s confirmed that he picked up a passenger from Instow who matches your description.’

  This time he didn’t wait for a response, but looked at her with the same steely focus. ‘Why the glass as a murder weapon again? And why the blue glass vase that Eve had made for Frank? Did it appeal to your sense of theatre? Or was it to shift our attention back to Westacombe? To Eve?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘A bit of both perhaps. Eve’s never been my favourite person, though Mack adored her. He seemed to be comparing me to her. She’s so together, so bloody competent. I always had the sense that she rather despised me. My parents were always banging on about how brilliant her glass was, how it had been exhibited at the V&A. But it was easy for her to be creative. Her father believed in her and supported everything she did. Besides, it was a challenge. A dare. I knew where the key through to Frank’s part of the house was kept. It was risky to walk up through the garden and steal the glass vase from his living room. I loved the thrill, the excitement, that adrenaline rush at the prospect of being caught breaking in to steal. Life had become so boring at home. I’d had so many plans after I left university. I was going to travel, fall in love, write my own novel.’

  ‘Couldn’t you still have done all those things?’ Jen asked.

  ‘No,’ Janey said. ‘I couldn’t. Everything at home revolved around Mack. You’ve seen how nothing is changed in his bedroom. My parents are stuck, fixed in time, and I’ve been sucked into their strange, unhealthy world.’

  Serial killing, Jen thought, is a pretty extreme way to escape, to get the excitement you craved. And by then you were caught up in the fantasy of it. You’re much madder than your brother ever was.

  ‘Tell me about today,’ Matthew said, ‘and Eve.’ He looked at the clock on the interview room wall. ‘Or I suppose I should say yesterday. What was all that about?’

  ‘She had to meddle.’ Janey had become the sulky child again. ‘Really, if she’d just left it alone…’

  … we might never have caught you. But Jen thought they would have caught her. They’d already made the connections. Ross had been sent to Cynthia’s to check that there’d been a serious conversation between Janey and Nigel at the party, but even without that confirmation, they’d have brought Janey in for questioning.

  ‘What did she do?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘She phoned my father.’ Janey paused. ‘If she’d just got in touch with me, I could have persuaded her. I could have sorted things out.’

  ‘How did she know you were involved?’

  ‘She didn’t know. How could she know? She guessed. She was asking my father all these questions about where I’d been. She must have heard me bringing Nigel’s car back the morning after he died. She recognized the engine sound, but after she’d found his body, she was in such a state of shock that it didn’t register, until early yesterday morning. And that got her thinking. She knew Wesley would do anything for me. So, there she was, on the phone, spreading her poison. My father overreacted, came into the cafe where I was working and started asking me for explanations.’ Janey looked up. ‘I’ve never been able to lie to my father. We’ve always bee
n close. He had to be both parents to us, while my mother only cared about her career.’

  ‘George should have contacted us,’ Matthew said sadly. ‘Now he’ll be prosecuted too.’ He stretched his arms above his head to relieve the tension. ‘You were both going to be in the Woodyard in the afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, we support the Cornish theatre company which put on the Beckett in the Sandpiper earlier in the week. They’re doing a mini-tour of the south-west and were in the Woodyard last night. Mum and I had agreed to help them set up, and we’d done all the advertising. Dad said he’d take over at the last minute.’

  ‘I saw the posters in the Woodyard lobby,’ Jen said.

  And Lucy Braddick saw George with Eve when she was coming out of the loo.

  ‘Did you know Eve would be there?’

  ‘Oh yeah. She’d kind of demanded to see Dad, to ask him all those questions. It was, like, talk to me or I’ll go to the police. So, Dad arranged to meet her in the Woodyard before the performance started. We both thought it would be better to keep her away from Instow, away from Mum, who’d make a drama out of the whole thing. Dad wanted to protect Mum, to just make the whole thing go away. And he did it for me, of course. I don’t know that Eve really thought I could be involved. Maybe she just needed reassurance. But again, we couldn’t risk it. I was thinking of Dad by then. Honestly, I was!’

  Yeah, right.

  ‘He and Mum hadn’t been properly close for ages. I was all he had after Mack died. He wouldn’t have survived me going to prison. It would be like losing another child.’

  ‘So, you took Eve to the chalet?’

  ‘Yeah. Dad persuaded her they couldn’t talk in the Woodyard. He said he’d take her somewhere quieter. Eve had known him for years, and everyone trusts the lovely George. She thought they were just going to chat in the car, but I was already in the driving seat and set off as soon as she got in. That was a bit of a surprise for her. Yes, you could say that she was quite shocked to see me.’ Janey gave that smug little smile that had come to define her. ‘And I already had the piece of broken glass. Luckily we had a little Yeo vase in the kitchen at home.’ She looked at Jen. ‘You probably saw it on the shelf when you came for coffee that morning. It was yellow. So pretty. As soon as they got in the car, I gave it to Dad and told him to use it if Eve made a fuss. That soon shut her up. It wasn’t part of the plan to kill her with it, but it was satisfying to scare her with her own creation, and it tied the plot together. That’s how I would have written it.’

  ‘What happened then?’ Despite herself, Jen was finding herself sucked into the narrative. Janey was a good storyteller. Perhaps in prison she’d finally write the novel she’d dreamed of.

  ‘We kept her in the chalet until it got dark. There are always people walking the coastal path. Then I had to go back to the Woodyard for the close of the play, to help the team pack up.’

  ‘And provide an alibi.’

  ‘Well, yes, if it should become necessary. Of course, we’d already taken Eve’s phone.’

  ‘And you told your father to kill her.’

  Another cruel smile. ‘I told you. My father loves me. I believed he would have done anything to rescue me, and to save me from prison.’ A pause. ‘I thought it would be seen as another tragedy. A bereaved daughter, walking on the cliffs, surprised by the storm. The path made suddenly dangerously slippery. A dreadful accident.’

  ‘But your father couldn’t quite do it.’

  ‘No.’ A tone of disdain. ‘It seems not.’

  They sat for a moment of silence. Matthew went through the formalities of the charges. Through the high window, Jen saw the first light of dawn.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  THE TEAM ATE TOGETHER IN A cafe by the river. Sausage sandwiches and mugs of coffee. The air was fresher, blowing in from the Atlantic with scudding clouds and occasional showers. Ross found it hard to share the celebration, the sense of relief. The day before, Mel had promised that they’d talk, that she’d tell him what had been bothering her over the past few weeks, but he’d not had a chance to get home. All the same, he hadn’t felt able to turn down Matthew’s offer of breakfast, because these people were starting to feel like family too.

  ‘I think that heatwave made everyone a little bit mad,’ Matthew said. ‘Do you reckon Janey would have continued her killing spree if the weather had been cooler on the night of Cynthia’s party?’

  ‘Yeah, I think she enjoyed it.’ Jen wiped tomato sauce from her chin. ‘It’s George I feel sorry for. I don’t think he had any idea what his daughter had done until Eve phoned him up yesterday morning with all those questions. And then he got swept along with Janey’s plan. He couldn’t deny her anything. In the interview, he kept saying that he must have been responsible. “We were their parents. We brought them up. And they were both damaged in their own way. I couldn’t lose another child.”’

  ‘Guilt,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s a terrible thing.’ He still thought Frank Ley had been weighed down with guilt and that this had contributed to his death. It wasn’t just that Lauren had rejected his offer of love.

  ‘They’re all a bit bonkers, aren’t they, these theatrical types?’ Ross swallowed the last of his sandwich and decided it was time to get home.

  ‘Poor Eve,’ Jen said. ‘All that trauma in a young person’s life. Will you go and see her, boss? Let her know what happened.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘I’ve already phoned and told Eve that both Janey and George have been charged. I’ll head over to Appledore to speak to her this afternoon. I need to go home and change. Lauren and her mother will be looking after her.’

  * * *

  Ross pulled onto the drive and saw that Mel’s car was still there. He’d lost track of her shift pattern and hadn’t known whether to expect her. She was in the kitchen, still in running gear, stretching, easing the muscles in her legs. Usually she’d have greeted him with a hug, an enquiry about the case, some joke about having to find a lover because she saw so little of him. Now, he wasn’t even sure that she was pleased to see him.

  She switched on the kettle. ‘Coffee?’ Her back to him. Just the stance of her body seemed tense and cold. Anxious.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘You told me we could talk.’

  ‘We will. Now.’

  ‘What have I been doing wrong? Whatever it is, I can fix it.’

  She turned so she was facing him. ‘I’m not sure that you can fix this.’

  He ran through his behaviour of the past month. He’d taken her for granted, assumed that because he was the main breadwinner he should decide how they ran their life, how they should spend their money. Perhaps he was like those men he’d read about: coercive, controlling. ‘I’m learning,’ he said. Then he wondered if that was true. Growing up, his model had been Joe Oldham, a close friend of his father’s, an old-fashioned cop and an old-fashioned man. And something about Ross still admired the superintendent for his swagger and his humour. His determination not to be cowed, to get whatever he wanted. Oldham had despised Matthew Venn from the moment he’d been appointed, and Ross had taken his lead from the man.

  ‘Is there someone else?’ It had been on his mind for days, that she might have a lover. Not a fling. A fling would be hard, but he thought he could cope with that. But what if she’d found someone she loved better than him? Someone more thoughtful. More gentle.

  She looked at him. ‘No! Is that what you’ve been thinking?’

  ‘You’ve been so distant,’ he said.

  ‘I suspected I was ill,’ she said. ‘Breast cancer. My mum had it when she was in her fifties. I found a lump. I had to go for a biopsy.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He couldn’t believe she would keep something like that to herself. Not a lover, but it felt like a different sort of betrayal.

  She shrugged. ‘You were so wrapped up in yourself. This case.’ A pause. ‘You liked me because I looked after you. The house. All this … I wasn’t sure how it would be if you had to take car
e of me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ He paused. ‘I will look after you.’

  ‘I had the result of the biopsy last night.’ She smiled. ‘Not malignant. I was being foolish, panicking. Nothing to worry about. Just a scare.’

  ‘And a scare for me.’ A warning, he thought. ‘Sit down,’ he said. He didn’t want her to see that he was on the verge of tears. ‘I’ll bring the coffee through.’

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  WHEN JEN GOT HOME, SHE HAD a moment of panic. There was no sign of the kids and they should be up and getting ready for school. She’d lost all sense of time; this week had been elastic: days had flashed by in a muddle of activity and then seconds had slowed to an eternity. Watching George and Eve on the clifftop, Jen had felt that she’d sat through a whole action movie, but scarcely minutes had passed. Only now did she realize that this was Saturday. A week ago, she’d been in bed with a hangover and she’d woken to Ella’s disapproval and news of Nigel Yeo’s death.

  She switched on the kettle to make tea. The dishwasher had been emptied and the surfaces were clear. Oh El, she thought, I really don’t know what I did to deserve you. There were footsteps on the stairs and her daughter appeared, her phone in one hand. She was texting, but she looked up when she saw Jen.

  ‘Hi, Mum. You must be knackered.’

  ‘Just a bit. The kettle’s still hot if you want a brew.’ She paused. ‘Your brother okay?’

  ‘Well, I think he was late on his computer, so don’t expect him to emerge anytime soon.’

  ‘Do you know what he’s up to when he’s on the computer?’

  ‘Mostly shoot ’em up games with his mates.’ Ella still had most of her attention on her phone. ‘I made him switch it off when Zach went home at one.’