by Tom Bradby
Suspicion, rather than being a response to facts, seemed to be causing her to teeter into lunacy from which it was impossible to make an objective judgement.
She exhaled heavily, looking up towards the darkness of the hill above. At that moment, the beam of a torch spun in a rapid semi-circle, as if being dropped, then extinguished, the darkness once again complete.
Julia straightened, still staring into the blackness beyond Michael’s house, drawn by an image straight from the night after Alice’s disappearance, feeling again that sense of pervasive discomfort at what they would find, at what a body would look like – at what had been done to her …
And then, suddenly, the hill was ablaze with colour and light – like a bomb she had seen in Armagh, like petrol poured on open flames. Without hesitating, or thinking, Julia ran, around the side of the house, fighting with the gate and failing to open it, before climbing over the wall and the stony path into the wood, guided by the ball of light ahead.
The trees were shadows, her breathing ragged, her vision blurring.
She ran forty paces, perhaps fifty, then stopped, sensing danger.
She ran again, seeing the flames flickering through the trees.
‘Pascoe!’ she shouted. Why did she think it was him?
The flames were lighting the way now and she began to feel the warmth of the air as the smell of petrol hit her. What was he doing? Trying to burn the forest? Or just out of patience and lighting a fire …
No, the smell was more ominous than that. It was in her mouth and throat: the sweet scent of a pig roasting on a spit.
‘Pascoe,’ she said, moving slowly, unwilling to go closer.
She stopped. ‘Pascoe.’ She took another step. For a second or two she could not comprehend the evidence of her eyes.
‘Christ,’ she said, running to the burning effigy. He hung from the tree. She could see his teeth, the blackened flesh retreating around his mouth …
‘Fuck,’ she said. A blanket, she thought, then water. She took off her sweater, trying to tie it around his feet, but the flames were hot and she was repulsed.
She circled, trying to think clearly, calmly, but failing. The flames seemed to have lessened around his head, so she ripped off her shirt, knelt down a yard or so away, then lunged towards him, throwing it around his body.
She turned, ran. ‘Help!’ she yelled, tearing through the trees, to the path, the hole in the hedge, the lawn and the gravel, before bursting in through the front door, into light and warmth and Michael standing, looking curious, then alarmed.
‘Burning!’ she shouted. ‘Pascoe’s burning! He’s on fire.’ She was out of breath. ‘Ambulance! Fire!’
He reacted instantly, turning and running for the kitchen and the phone, following her out, only seconds later it seemed, into the walled garden at the back, before slamming the door against the wall, yanking the hose and dragging it towards the gate. ‘We’ll get the hose as close as we can,’ he shouted. ‘It’s locked,’ he said, as they reached the gate. ‘I’ll climb over the wall, you get back to the tap and turn it on full.’
She ran.
‘There are some tin buckets there,’ he shouted.
Julia turned on the tap, picked up the buckets, got to the wall, threw them over, lifted herself up on the gate, reached the top, jumped, saw the hose moving ahead of her and followed, catching him by the entrance to the wood.
‘Here.’ He put the hose in the bucket, let it fill. ‘Go.’
Julia ran, the flickering image the only point of reference in the dark.
They passed each other, silently, shadows in the wood.
He got back first and shoved the hose in his bucket, not looking at her, cursing under his breath. It seemed to take an age to fill, then he thrust it into hers and took off, grunting almost inaudibly. They passed each other twice more, grim anger in his face as they crossed and then, as she got back to Pascoe, the flames seemed to be dying and her bucket killed the fire around his head.
Another two staggering journeys and then the flames were out. They were standing together in the darkness, she naked from the waist up but for her bra, in front of the blackened corpse. She could make out little but the teeth.
The body was twisting in the wind.
The smell choked her again.
She turned, bent double.
He had his hand on her back, helped her straighten.
‘Do you think …’ She faltered.
‘He’s dead,’ he said, his voice flat with defeat. She wondered if he thought Pascoe could have been saved, or if he had simply been driven by the horror of what they had seen.
Neither of them moved until they caught sight of the flashing blue light on the other side of the valley. ‘I think we’d better go and help them locate us,’ he said. He took her arm, put it into his shirt, which she had not noticed him remove. ‘Rather they see me naked, I think,’ he said.
Later, Julia stood on the landing of Michael’s house, watching activity on the hill. It was all the same: the flickering tape, the men in uniform and the lights of the television cameras. She wondered who in the village would know by now, and who would sleep on, unaware.
Michael came back in, his face sombre. ‘The police will talk to you in the morning.’
She nodded, staring out of the window.
‘I’ll take you home in your car and walk back.’
She turned slowly to him and nodded again.
They walked down the stairs and out of the front door into the drive. The cloud had cleared and it was bright now from an almost full moon.
They could hear the sound of the power generators on the hill behind.
Michael started the engine and turned the car round. They didn’t talk on the way and when they reached her home, he put the keys into her hand and she got out and walked towards the house, without looking at him.
Inside, she shut the door, locked it and pulled across the chain.
Julia found her mother and Alan sitting at the kitchen table. She stood in the hallway and looked at them.
Caroline stood up immediately, came forward and hugged her. After a moment, Alan did the same, so that the three of them clung together, Julia’s hands around their backs.
It took her a second to realize that her eyes were wet with tears. Her mother gripped her tighter.
Her shoulders shaking, Julia said, ‘When is this going to stop frightening me?’
Alan was staring at the floor. Her mother’s hand cupped the back of her head. Neither of them answered. ‘We must make sure the door is locked,’ Alan said. ‘We must make sure all the windows are shut.’
Mac’s heart sank as he reached the fourteenth floor of Wilkes’s tower block and once again confronted the empty darkness of flat 4B.
He pushed open the door and switched on the light. There were no curtains, so he could see out of the dirty windows to a similar tower block opposite.
The flat was bare. There was a green sofa, a chair and a coffee-table. The newest item in the room was the television in the corner. There was a sideboard, which had been searched, its drawers sitting on top. Mac looked through them, finding an old camera, some beer mats, pens, blank paper, paperclips, some glue and a couple of postcards from Australia, depicting women with large breasts. They were both signed ‘Danny’ and contained no useful information.
Mac retreated to the middle of the room. He ought to have searched the flat more thoroughly on his last visit.
In the bedroom, the bed had been stripped and the mattress pushed on to the floor. Again, all the drawers were out on their sides and appeared to have been searched. Mac looked through their contents, but could find nothing personal in them – no bank statements, letters from the council or an employer. There were some tapes, an undeveloped film, a book token, with no message inside, a ten-pound note, five American dollars, a selection of porn videos and about twenty copies of Penthouse.
That was it.
Mac stepped back. He thought the flat had been systematically strip
ped.
He looked under the bed and behind the chest of drawers. When he shifted the cupboard in the corner, he found an old cheque book, crumpled up into a ball.
Mac turned towards the door. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. At least he knew now that Wilkes banked at Lloyds on Wandsworth High Street. It was the smaller version of a cheque book, without stubs, and Wilkes had not bothered to detail to whom he’d written cheques in the section at the front.
Mac walked to the next-door flat and knocked. Eventually the young man came to the door, this time without the dog. He was still wearing a white T-shirt.
‘You again,’ he said. ‘He’s not been back.’
‘Do you have any idea where he is?’
‘No, but you’ve done his flat over. Why did you do that?’
‘Not me,’ Mac said. ‘You must know something about him. Where he works, who he sees, family, friends – anything.’
The boy stepped forward. ‘Look it’s not my fault. He never talks or nothing. Never even says good morning.’
Mac sighed. ‘Have you ever seen him with a bag, or clothes, or a car with any company name on – anything to indicate where he works?’
He shook his head.
Mac looked at him for a moment more. ‘All right, thanks.’ He turned away, then thought better of it. ‘Hold on a second.’ He took out his pad and wrote down his mobile number on it. ‘Look, I need to get hold of this man. It’s for his own good. If he comes back, will you call me?’
‘What’s it worth?’
Mac sighed, inaudibly. ‘What do you want?’
‘A hundred.’
‘Fifty.’
‘A hundred.’
‘All right,’ Mac said. ‘But you’d better call or you’ll be getting something else.’
For a moment, the young man returned his stare, then dropped his eyes.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JULIA SLEPT FITFULLY and awoke to find her mother sitting on her bed. In this sense, and in others, she had a sense of history repeating itself. It was like the day after she had discovered Sarah’s body on the common. She saw on the old clock above her that it was eight o’clock in the morning.
Caroline stroked her forehead. ‘The police are here to see you. Alan has already talked to them. They’ve promised to be brief.’
Julia sat up, frowning, as her mother left. She pushed back the bedclothes. Caroline had brought her a cup of hot, sweet tea, which she sipped.
Julia took her time, just as she had on the morning after Sarah’s death, but the feelings and emotions were different. This time, there was fear, not just emotional but physical.
Who had killed Pascoe?
Uncertainty and unease seemed to slow her down, as if they were physical, rather than emotional, entities.
Downstairs in the living room, Professor Malcolm, Mac and DC Baker stood in a semi-circle, the morning sunlight behind them, casting their faces in shadow.
Julia could see her mother through the window, working on the flower-bed at the far side of the drive.
‘I suppose I should offer you some coffee?’ she said.
Professor Malcolm shook his head, so did Mac. He was embarrassed when Julia looked at him. Baker declined, too. Her manner was businesslike and she had a small notebook open in front of her. ‘We need to ask a couple of questions.’
‘Yes.’ Julia sat in the armchair in the corner. Baker and Professor Malcolm took the sofa, and Mac the chair by Caroline’s desk.
‘You were with Michael Haydoch?’ Baker asked. Professor Malcolm was staring at the floor. ‘He told us you had just left.’
Julia turned to face Mac. She saw into his eyes before he had had time to look away.
She nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘You were just leaving when you saw … what?’
She sighed. ‘First a torchlight, then what seemed like an explosion, though there was no sound, just a blaze of light, tearing into the night sky. Then I ran.’
‘A torch?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unmistakably a torch-beam?’
She nodded, remembering how it had reminded her of the night of Alice’s death and the torchlight search parties. ‘Why is that significant?’ Julia asked.
‘No torch has been found at the scene.’
‘Well, I certainly didn’t remove it.’
Baker raised her hand. ‘No. It’s not a question of that.’
Baker was sitting with her knees close together and Julia thought she was the sort to have once been a school prefect, if not head girl. ‘When you arrived at the scene, Miss Havilland, was there anything to suggest … well, anything to suggest a struggle?’
Julia shook her head.
‘You found nothing else there – just the body, twisting from that branch, burning?’
Julia tried to think back and recall the scene. ‘There was a petrol can, leaning against the tree trunk, but you must have found that. That was obviously what he had been doused with before being set alight. But … I’m sorry, I wasn’t really thinking straight. There may well have been other things that I missed.’
Baker was writing in her book. ‘You saw Pascoe,’ she said, ‘a few days ago. You called some of my colleagues out to the house.’
Julia nodded. ‘Yes, he was being harassed by people from the village.’
‘You just … came across this, or you were visiting him at the time?’
‘I just came across it, but I didn’t think it fair, so I bundled him back into the house and called the police station in Cranbrooke. When some of your officers arrived I left.’
‘How did he seem?’
She sighed. ‘He was … It was as if he was mentally retarded. I don’t remember him saying much. He seemed a pathetic, sad figure, to begin with, but he later became aggressive.’
‘Have you known him a long time?’
‘I knew him before he went to prison, when I was a child.’
‘But he didn’t say anything to you on the day you saw him?’
‘Only what I told Professor Malcolm.’
Mac’s mobile phone rang. He took it out and walked into the next-door room to answer it. Julia heard him say, ‘Right.’ Then, ‘No, I said a hundred,’ and finally, ‘But he’s there?’
Mac came back in and raised his hand to both Baker and Professor Malcolm. Julia got the impression that they knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. Baker told him to wait and she followed him out, thanking Julia for her time and warning her to stay inside after nightfall, if possible.
Professor Malcolm was still sitting opposite her. They were silent.
‘My head cannot think clearly,’ she said, quietly. ‘My heart feels betrayed.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You, Mac. Together.’
‘I could tell you we had your interests at heart, but you would recoil from that.’
‘Why?’
‘Look, it’s all right, Julia.’
She sighed, looking at her hands in her lap. ‘Why is it that I feel you have already reached a conclusion?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She looked up at him. ‘You’re lying to me.’
‘No. The road from suspicion to certainty is a slow one.’
‘I didn’t know you had suspicions.’
‘Everyone here has suspicions.’
She stared at her hands again. ‘Why are you going to dig up our gardens?’
‘Because, at the end of the day, as I’ve said, to bring a criminal prosecution, a police investigation needs evidence.’
Julia waited for him to continue. ‘There is something,’ she said, ‘missing from this conversation.’
Julia watched her mother straighten and wipe her brow outside. It was hot again today.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘What is missing is how you have got to the point at which you are prepared to contemplate something so … You know what I mean. You have
reached conclusions that you’ve kept from me. You and Breckenridge have, for example, I’m certain, had conversations behind my back that go considerably further than those I’ve been a party to.’
Professor Malcolm had moved forward to the edge of his seat. ‘Look, it is just …’ There was a long pause. Julia heard the sound of a mower being started in the garden. ‘It’s just, over time, the inexplicable elements of a case settle into a pattern where the only potential rational explanations begin to point in one direction.’
Julia frowned.
‘You mentioned Mrs Simpson. Do you recall? The head teacher at East Welham Primary. You said she would be worth talking to. I think I’d like you to go and see her.’
‘About what?’
‘About Alice.’
‘And you’ve been to see her already?’
‘Yes. I came to look for you, but you were out. It was something you said actually … Anyway, see what she has to say.’
‘I get the constant impression this is a lesson,’ Julia said. Professor Malcolm did not respond. ‘Like a tutorial, except that the subject matter is no longer academic.’ He was staring at the floor. ‘Did you ever need me … I mean, what’s this really about? For you, I mean. I can’t say that I understand.’
‘It’s about you.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘It’s not just about your father, or about justice. It’s about you.’
‘In what way?’
‘It’s about everything that you’ve put on the shelf. The relationships and friendships that have been curtailed or failed to reach their potential. It’s about trust. It’s about intimacy. It’s about what happened in Beijing and why.’
‘I don’t see how my private life has any bearing—’
‘No? What about relationships that are severed because you cannot bear the possibility that someone else will leave your life against your will? You make sure the power to decide remains in your hands.’ He was looking at her. ‘Sound familiar? What about a chronic inability to trust anyone because of the corrosive suspicion that your father, the man you most trusted and admired in the world, could have been guilty of – of this? What about the memories of him? Do they mean anything? Can anything be good or worthy or reliable if he was always capable of this, if it was within him? Intimacy is about trust, you know, and this is about giving you back your life.’
